{"id":1892,"date":"2019-09-11T01:36:02","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T01:36:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/09\/11\/exposing-what-the-police-and-courts-didnt-and-what-society-owes-in-return\/"},"modified":"2025-02-06T16:06:58","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T16:06:58","slug":"exposing-what-the-police-and-courts-didnt-and-what-society-owes-in-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/09\/11\/exposing-what-the-police-and-courts-didnt-and-what-society-owes-in-return\/","title":{"rendered":"Exposing what the police and courts wouldn’t \u2014 and what society owes in return"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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It\u2019s difficult to find a writer who isn\u2019t haunted by a story. It could have been the quest that couldn\u2019t catch a glint in an editor\u2019s eye. Maybe one that got away when sources, or record keepers, wouldn\u2019t cooperate. Or even those that were even published, but didn\u2019t quite cut it; they needed just one more day, two more interviews or the 500 words that ended up on the cutting-room floor.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Then there are the never-written tales that writers can\u2019t get out of their heads.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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For Elizabeth Bruenig, it was a story from August, 2006, when she was a 15-year-old student at James Martin High School in Arlington, Texas. That scorching summer and into the fall, rumors and harsh judgements ran wild through the corridors, locker rooms, fast-food joints and kitchen tables in the sprawling Dallas suburb about an incident involving a female cheerleader and two boys, who were both student athletes. Bruenig didn\u2019t know the girl\u2019s name, but what lingered in her mind was a cryptic but, when deciphered, obscene message, painted \u201clike gravestones\u201d on the rear windows of rows of the seniors\u2019 cars that filled the school parking lot: FAITH.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The controversy boiled down to a simple, but dismayingly familiar equation. The girl said she\u2019d been sexually assaulted after a drunken party. The boys denied it. The police had a strong case. But the community, with a few exceptions, a grand jury, and the local prosecutor\u2019s office, sided with the boys. No one was held accountable. The girl, who felt her life was ruined, disappeared.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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That was the horrific story that stuck with Bruenig through high school, into college and then graduate school. When she got a job writing for The New Republic nearly a decade after the event, she finally had the chance to do something about it.  It took another three years, and a move to another journalism job, to complete her quest. But the result was a tour-de-force of narrative.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cWhat do we owe her now?\u201d<\/a> is an 11,000-word blend of blistering reportage and philosophical meditations into the nature of morality and culpability. Bruenig calls it an \u201cessayistic reported piece.\u201d It was published, along with videos by Gillian Brockell, in September 2018 by The Washington Post, which Bruenig joined in 2016 after The New Republic was put up for sale. She now is an opinion writer<\/a>, focusing on religion, politics and morality in public life.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Her story on the unresolved rape case was her first foray into investigative work. But it\u2019s an auspicious, elegantly written launch. It was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing<\/a> and a National Magazine Award. The Pulitzer judges cited Bruenig\u2019s \u201celoquent reflections on the exile of a teen sexual assault victim in the author\u2019s Texas hometown, delving with moral authority into why the crime remained unpunished.\u201dBut \u201cWhat do we owe her now?\u201d is much more than a think piece. Through social media she identified the victim, Amber Wyatt, who agreed to participate. Using the voluminous records of a painfully graphic police investigation, forensic and hospital reports, and extensive interviews, Bruenig was able to document with stunning granularity what happened to Wyatt that night, and, later, to the two boys accused of assaulting her. The post-assault fallout is equally brutal when Wyatt, as Bruenig observes, is not only \u201cjust doubted but hated, not simply mocked but exiled.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Elizabeth Bruenig<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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Bruenig, who has a master of philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge, was intent on writing more than a true-crime story. She also wanted to explore the moral implications of an alleged crime that left the victim scorned by a community who preferred to believe her assailants.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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She told me that her training in ethics  \u2014 \u201cwhere you take facts and information and events in the world and you try to really understand them and what they mean morally for the people who are involved\u201d \u2014 deeply influenced the her work.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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She accomplished both goals with unflinching scenes of sexual assault and conveying the sting of being ostracized, delivered with precise diction and haunting cadences. Stringing clauses like pearls on a necklace, Bruenig spins luminous and searing passages that explore the moral as well as the physical and emotional abuse of Wyatt, who spiraled into alcohol and drug abuse, petty crime and a serious overdose before belief in a \u201cspiritual power\u201d pulled her back from the brink. Today she is married, pursuing an undergraduate degree in psychology and has worked as a teaching assistant in a forensic psychology course. Wyatt never returned to Arlington, although after Bruenig\u2019s story ran, some of her doubters reached out through social media to seek atonement.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The result of Bruenig\u2019s indefatigable effort is a powerful reminder of the extended assault faced by victims who are met with disbelief and suspicion. As such, \u201cWhat do we owe her now?\u201d should be required reading, not only for students of narrative, but for anyone trying to understand the unrelenting realities behind the #MeToo era that was spawned in the circles of power and celebrity. In Wyatt\u2019s case, as Bruenig concludes, \u201cthe rot was always there, even in smaller and less remarkable places, where power takes mundane, suburban shapes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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We asked Bruenig to reflect on her long-delayed quest to pursue a story she couldn\u2019t let go, and the challenges of blending journalism with philosophy. Our conversation is followed by an annotation of the story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What led you to write this story after all these years?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Everybody has probably had an experience where they were on the periphery, or it was something they heard about or was kind of a town legend. That was the case here. When I was growing up, it was a major event at my school. And even when I went on to college, and then grad school, it just stuck with me, something that would come up periodically, or when I would visit home. I would remember the writing on the cars that year, but I never really knew the truth. And that bothered me. It was strange, because I had heard all the stories and seen all the writing and the graffiti and, at the same time, I knew nothing about what had actually happened. So I guess the mystery of it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What professional and personal experiences influenced the story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Editing in a section like Outlook<\/a> (where Bruenig worked before being named an opinion writer) enabled it to a huge degree. We publish essays, but it\u2019s also a place for hardcore reporting. We have newsroom standards for facts and, at the same time, the opportunity to bring peoples\u2019 opinions and arguments. You see a very literary and illuminating mix of genres. Professionally, that was very helpful. When I did my graduate work at Cambridge, I studied Christian theology, focusing on ethics. It\u2019s a world of scholarship. I took that sensibility into journalism.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Did you have any literary models in mind as you worked on the story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Renata Adler<\/a>. I\u2019m a big fan.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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David Carr\u2019s \u201cNight of the Gun.\u201d<\/a> That always stood out to me as being pretty major, even though you\u2019re obviously dealing with a very different series of events and very different people. But the intent of not only explaining what happened, and in a factual and kind of granular way, but also why<\/em> it happened.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And Truman Capote\u2019s \u201cIn Cold Blood\u201d<\/a> was in the back of my mind. There have been a lot of questions about the factual accuracy there. But again, that mixture of reporting, and then that instinct to try to explain the why of an event, was important to me.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What were the most difficult challenges you faced reporting and writing the story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The length of time that had passed between the events and the reporting presented some challenges. People had moved out of the area, gotten married, changed their names. That periodically made tracking them down hard. We had to compete with the sense that the matter was closed and convince people to talk about it. And of course, much of the actual physical evidence from Amber\u2019s case had been destroyed shortly after the no-bill<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Were there any lessons you learned about your craft from writing the story? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It certainly took a lot of thinking about chronology, because there are actually several narrative timelines: 1996, 2006, 2018. I learned quite a bit about when to introduce information and how to write in a way that\u2019s maybe not entirely chronological but is still intuitive and doesn\u2019t disrupt a reader\u2019s sense of time. That was very useful and was something I came in with almost no sense of whatsoever.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What was the reaction of readers?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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We received thousands of comments, and I still get frequent emails about the story to this day. A lot of people, especially people from Arlington, reached out to Amber. Sometimes people email me to tell me about incidents that have happened in their own hometowns, or experiences they have had that are similar to Amber\u2019s. Sometimes they are asking for help; oftentimes their cases are past statutes of limitation or were investigated, briefly, like Amber\u2019s, without resolution. Sometimes people just want to tell someone else so someone else knows.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What roles did your editors play?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Ruth Marcus was my primary editor, and Fred Hiatt edited as well. There was also valiant copy-editing and fact-checking by Lydia Rebac. Ruth was absolutely instrumental in getting a good shape and rhythm down for the story (which meant cutting out a lot of fat, which I tend to put in.) She also guided the reporting in a huge way \u2014 letting me know where to push more, where to get more voices. Fred\u2019s questions added a lot of depth, and helped me sense where thoughtful readers might want to know a little more. And of course, without Lydia the whole thing would be unreadable. Her copy-editing was essential for flow, consistency, meeting the requirements of the English language. <\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What emotional impact did reporting and writing this horrific story have on you? How did you cope?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It was pretty transformative. I\u2019m glad I did it but I\u2019m more somber then I was before, I think, and I come to conclusions more slowly than I once did. That could also just be a function of getting older. With this project and subsequent projects, trying not to get too immersed in the darkest details of life has been a challenge, definitely something I have to really refocus on periodically. Oddly, while working on Amber\u2019s story, when I would get into periods of very black depression over the details and so forth \u2014 I remember telling myself, \u2018everyone lived, everyone has a chance to go on\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What ultimately is the answer to the question posed in the title? What do you think we owe her now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I think we owe her this story, reading it, remembering it. Just bearing witness to the truth \u2014 that always seemed like a big part of it to me.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The annotation:<\/strong>\u00a0Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Bruenig\u2019s responses in blue. <\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Amber Wyatt more than a decade after her claims of violent sexual assault by two high school athletes were turned against her.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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WHAT DO WE OWE HER NOW?<\/h2>\nBy\u00a0Elizabeth Bruenig in Arlington, Tex.
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\nVideos by\u00a0Gillian Brockell
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\nThe Washington Post


\n\n<\/a>Did you write the title? What was it intended to accomplish?<\/span>I didn\u2019t write the title. Actually, there was quite a bit of back-and-forth over how to title it. Headlines, we were used to \u2014 but this seemed to call for something different. I was always in favor of a very artistic, sort of abstract title, but that isn\u2019t quite our style in editorial. So we discussed for a while as a team, and everyone eventually settled on this, which was just meant to highlight one of the biggest lingering questions of the piece.<\/span><\/span>\n

PART ONE<\/h3>\n

About that night<\/em><\/h4>\nAug. 11, 2006, was a sweltering Friday night in the midst of a long, fatally hot summer. <\/a>Why did you call it \u201cfatally\u201d hot? Is it foreshadowing?<\/span>2006 was an extremely hot summer even by Texas standards \u2014 people died that year due to the heat. It\u2019s not exactly foreshadowing for the story itself, but for me, Texas is a character here, and I wanted to set it up as a place of occasionally brutal conditions \u2014 climactic and otherwise. So I gestured to just how extreme that season had been.<\/span><\/span>A 16-year-old girl reported that she was raped that night, in a storage shed off a dirt road in my hometown of Arlington, Tex. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it, and nobody was punished except, arguably, her: By the end of the fall semester, she had disappeared from our high school, leaving only sordid rumors and a nascent urban legend.<\/a>What a wonderful turn of phrase in that last clause.<\/span>Thank you! For me, part of the challenge was getting across just how odd it was that the whole thing evaporated so quickly.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nI never saw her, the rising junior-class cheerleader who said she had been assaulted by two senior boys after a party. I only heard about her. People whispered about her in classrooms and corridors as soon as school started that year. The tension in the school was so thick that the gossip about what had taken place trickled down even to the academic decathletes and debate nerds like me, the kids who could only speculate about what happened at the parties of athletic seniors.\u00a0I was a 15-year-old sophomore, and even I formed a notion of what had happened, or what was said to have happened. <\/a>You paint yourself in a less-than-flattering light? Why?<\/span>One reason is that it helps explain why I didn\u2019t have more proximity than I did to the principal figures. But another reason was that I didn\u2019t want to appear to come off as a saint or a hero. I wasn\u2019t then, and am not now.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nLeaving school one autumn day in 2006, I stood at the top of the concrete stairs at the back exit, with the senior parking lot spread out before me, cars gleaming in the still afternoon sun. <\/a>You open with a summary of the event, then segue directly into a scene? Why did you choose this way to open your story? Did you consider other entry points?<\/span>We went through a few different openings, because there are several in-roads into the story \u2014 where Amber is today, or the 1996 case, or the party itself, etc. I think I eventually settled on this because I wanted to draw the reader from the general description into the action as quickly and concretely as possible, so that they would feel as invested in this story as I did. I thought that putting them there on the scene, in the middle of a mystery, would help with that.<\/span><\/span> Several of them bore a message scrawled in chalk-paint: FAITH. They looked to me like gravestones, brief and cryptic in neat rows.\n

\nThe next day, people whispered about the word in the halls. It was an acronym, I learned, meaning \u201cf— Amber in the head,\u201d or \u201cf— Amber in three holes,\u201d <\/a>Why didn\u2019t you use the complete word?<\/span>We were up against Post<\/em> style there, and we rarely, if ever, print out profanity.<\/span><\/span> which I awkwardly explained to my parents when they asked me one evening why so many cars around town were thus marked. The idea struck me as brutally, unspeakably ugly, and it was the ugliness that came to mind each time I saw some rear windshield dripping the word in streaky chalk <\/a>\u201cDripping\u201d is such an evocative verb. Why did you use it?<\/span>Something about the humidity of my part of Texas, and the way people wrote that stuff on and then neglected it \u2014 it got at the entanglement of a harsh, unsympathetic climate with a harsh, unsympathetic society.<\/span><\/span> at the local Jack in the Box or Sonic Drive-In. <\/a>Why did you use the proper names of the fast food place the students favored?<\/span>For me it was partially about capturing what that suburban landscape really felt like \u2014 it\u2019s not a small Texas town, which I worried might be assumed because of the involvement of football players etc, but it\u2019s also not a city like Dallas or Houston with a lot of interesting hot spots for teenagers to hang out at. And part of it was about recreating this teenage world, where kids hang out at fast food places and that\u2019s where gossip and rumors spread.<\/span><\/span> Eventually I heard the girl had recanted her allegations and then had gone away; the writing on the cars, too, went away, and the question of what had happened that night.\n

\nAnd then it was quiet, life was mundane, things resumed: Like an ancient society settling back to rights after a gladiatorial games or ritual sacrifice.<\/a>You used an analogy, comparing the chalked rear windows to gravestones. Here you employ a simile? What is the value of these literary devices? Do they take a lot of work\/time to craft or pop-up unannounced?<\/span>The literary stuff, which did bug my editors to some degree (rightfully so; there was a lot more of it before they got finished!) was, for me, about imparting the feeling of being there as much as the facts on the ground. Some of the literary devices I was less happy with after tinkering with them for a while, and some were very immediate \u2014 the gravestone thing was very immediate, and I never messed with it after laying it down initially.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nYet despite the fortune of a happy life, I found it difficult, over the ensuing years, not to think about what had happened that August. I still remembered the taste of summer there, and the pregnant threat of storm clouds,\u00a0 among which flashes of lightning pulsed like veins of silver, and the sense that youth meant collecting inklings of things I couldn\u2019t fully know. <\/a>You give the reader a lyrical, tactile description of a Texas summer, followed by a wise description of the limitations of youth. Did that undergo revision?<\/span>There was a little bit of revision right here, but not much. I think the section mostly came about when my editor asked: What is most important for readers to know here before we get into the facts of this very complicated, very detailed story? And the climate and the sensation of being there were important for me.<\/span><\/span> One of them was the impression I had gained that year, that vulnerability sometimes begets bloodlust and revulsion, even in seemingly ordinary people. Another was the sense that the damage that follows litters the underside of society, beneath the veneer of peace.<\/a>Here the story moves from reportage to an, to use your term, essayistic exploration of life and morality with shifts in tone and voice. How would you describe the change and why did you decide to take this approach?<\/span>I think of it as going from more introspective to more external \u2014 here\u2019s how I\u2019ve thought about all of this up to now, and here\u2019s what I can tell you about it for sure. I felt like both pieces were part of the story in their own way and wanted to incorporate them both, but we also wanted to be sure the reporting was crystal clear and very solid. So I thought a tone shift was important to signal that movement.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nIn April 2015, as a young writer, I was granted the rare opportunity to explore this notion. I was working at the New Republic magazine at the time, enjoying the warm auspices of an editor mostly content to let me pursue what I found most interesting. <\/a>Why were you compelled to pursue this story? What was your goal setting out?<\/span><\/span><\/span> With his blessing, I reached out that spring to the girl whose name had appeared in acronyms and spray-painted slurs, and asked whether she was interested in talking to me about 2006.<\/a>How did you find her?<\/span>On Facebook. I had never really heard her full name clearly \u2014 I thought maybe her name was Amber White. All I knew was her first name and the sound of the last name, because these really had been rumors passed along in whispers. I asked an old teacher of mine what her name had really been, and she told me. And then I found Amber and contacted her through Facebook messenger.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nHer name was Amber Wyatt, and she was. <\/a>Were you surprised Amber was willing to talk?<\/span>Yeah. If it were me, I\u2019m not sure that I would have had the guts. You take the worst thing that ever happened to you. You\u2019ve already been through the denial and the response of the legal system and the society you were in at the time and then someone comes in and says, \u201cHow about we do it all again?\u2019<\/span><\/span> <\/a>How involved was she in your reporting process?<\/span>It wasn\u2019t passive involvement. The only way we were able to get the police files which were sealed because she was16 was to have Amber request them. She submitted a request for her hospital records. And then, of course, interviews upon interviews about what happened: What do you remember? Who was there? What was their name? We did a big interview, where I got her recollection of events before I had the police file, so I could compare. She had to agree to go through that. That was really impressive.<\/span><\/span>\n\n



\n\nOn and off over the next three years, I reviewed police documents, interviewed witnesses and experts, and made several pilgrimages home to Texas to try to understand what exactly happened to Wyatt \u2014 not just on that night, but in the days and months and years that followed. Making sense of her ordeal meant tracing a web of failures, lies, abdications and predations, at the center of which was a node of power that, though anonymous and dispersed, was nonetheless tilted firmly against a young, vulnerable girl. Journalists, activists and advocates began to uncover that very same imbalance of power from Hollywood to Capitol Hill in the final year of this reporting, in an explosion of reporting and analysis we\u2019ve come to call the #MeToo Movement. But the rot was always there \u2014 even in smaller and less remarkable places, where power takes mundane, suburban shapes.\n

\nThere were personal reasons, too, for my investigation. I wanted to understand why it had to be as bad as it was \u2014 why she wasn\u2019t just doubted but hated, not simply mocked but exiled \u2014 and why it had always lingered on my conscience like an article of unfinished business, something I had meant to do but hadn\u2019t. I wanted to look directly at the dark things that are revealed when episodes of brutality unfold and all pretense of civilization temporarily fades, and I wanted to understand them completely.<\/a>Would you consider those two graphs your nut graph?<\/span>Yeah, for me it was essentially to lay them down early on, to help guide the shape of the story as I wrote out the rest. So they developed pretty quickly. My editor, Ruth Marcus, was key in getting these paragraphs together precisely because the story is so long and so complicated. She felt like readers needed some signposting to navigate the story \u2014 and I think she was right about that. Her questions helped a lot in structuring these grafs. I am not always the most natural nut graf writer, especially with long, complicated stories…My urge is always to say, \u201cThis is complicated!\u201d but everyone knows that. The challenge is telling them something they don\u2019t know.<\/span><\/span><\/a>When you wrote the paragraphs about your personal reasons, did you ask yourself, \u201cWhy am I doing this?\u201d and then seek to answer it, polishing, and revising as you went along?<\/span> They came along early, probably in the very first draft I ever wrote down, and was kind of a prototype of a nut graf \u2014 it tells you why I felt so strongly about working on this, though it didn\u2019t succeed in telling readers why they<\/em> ought to care. So in subsequent revisions, I did end up thinking more about how readers would be better served by a few lines that got more at what the story could tell them, and what it says more broadly, than just letting them in on why I had felt so fixated on it for so long.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nOtherwise, I thought, they could at any time pull me under. And I could watch mutely while something like this happened again.\n



\nEast Texas is pine woods: subtropical growth, spindly trees rising out of green creeks as forest shades into bayou, the smell of drifting water. West Texas is arid, miles of prairie and stretches of red desert, with pale dunes rising just before you hit New Mexico. Arlington, population of roughly 367,000 in 2006, sits between Dallas to the east and Fort Worth to the west, suspended between Deep South and Wild West. Its current slogan is \u201cThe American Dream City,\u201d and it\u2019s true: a dream of anywhere in America, with suburban sprawl and yellow grass along the interstates and big-box stores. <\/a>This is such a savvy way to open this section, with its blend of geography, topography and cultural identity. Where did you get the idea for this?<\/span>I love Texas, and I always wanted Texas to be a figure in the story, so topping a section with it made sense for me. I think Cormac McCarthy, honestly, and a few other Texas writers have really influenced my sense of the place as an obvious setting for the epic \u2014 though maybe all Texans naturally feel like Texas is an epic place. The different climate zones of Texas and how they meet in this odd stripe in the middle was something I thought about growing up, noticing how different our weather was than Louisiana (where my mom\u2019s family is from) and West Texas.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nThat year, the \u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d television series premiered, putting the romance of Texas high school football in soft focus. There are towns in Texas where the whole city turns out for Friday night football games, but Arlington isn\u2019t one of them, and James Martin High School wasn\u2019t a football school. <\/a>Sense of place infuses the story whether it\u2019s Arlington or the rape scene? Why is that critical for the story?<\/span>I thought it was just critical to concretize it \u2014 oddly, that seems to make it more generalizable, to me. This happened in a very specific place, but it could\u2019ve happened anywhere in America. The more abstract a place is, the harder it is, I think, for readers to relate.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nStill, on the afternoon of Aug. 11, the Martin football crowd celebrated \u201cWar Party\u201d \u2014 a kind of catered pep rally meant to kick off the football season before the start of school. For the kids, though, the main attraction was the after-party.\n

\nWyatt was celebrating her inaugural year on the varsity cheerleading squad that evening. She performed routines at War Party, and around 9 p.m., arrived in her car at a 4,756 square-foot residence, <\/a>How do you know the square footage?<\/span>Real estate listings!<\/span><\/span>owned by the parents of another cheerleader. It was one of many fine homes within the gates of its upscale subdivision, with a spacious driveway out front and a lagoon-like swimming pool in back \u2014 a striking contrast to Wyatt\u2019s far smaller home in an aging neighborhood across town. Even if no one spoke openly about the class distinctions among the cheerleaders, they were well understood. <\/a>Much in this story revolves around status, doesn\u2019t it? Was that a conscious decision?<\/span>It does, and that was something I didn\u2019t have as strong of a sense of going in. It\u2019s something that permeates culture \u2014 talk about \u2018trashy girls\u2019 versus \u2018nice girls\u2019 and \u2018nice boys from nice families.\u2019 I wanted to capture that as it became clear to me from reading and conducting interviews that it had been a factor here in determining public opinion.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nThat night Wyatt was buoyant, thrilled and on the young side for the night\u2019s crowd, mostly juniors and seniors. She had a natural beauty, golden-skinned with long, dark hair. She had always been athletic and happiest on teams, playing soccer and participating in competitive cheerleading. She was wildly sociable, with A\u2019s and B\u2019s in school and an overwhelming urge to be liked. She was earthy and indelicate, not remotely shy; friends came easily, and she leaned on their approval. Arlington cheerleaders were, by many accounts, a hard-partying crowd, and Wyatt partied with the hardest of them, drinking with her friends and occasionally indulging in drugs such as Xanax and marijuana. <\/a>Did you worry that by describing her drug use that it would immediately give some people a reason to excuse her assailants\u2019 behavior?<\/span>Yeah, I knew that it would strike some people that way. I felt like those same people would probably be even more skeptical if they felt I had tried to hide it from them. Because addiction and substance abuse become such a big part of the story, I didn\u2019t want to hide them at all \u2014 I just wanted to give them a chance to unfold in a way that might surprise people who would initially find them wholly discrediting.<\/span><\/span>\n

\n\u201cI partied a lot. I\u2019m not going to lie,\u201d Wyatt recalled in a 2015 interview. \u201cI was 16, I wanted to be that popular girl, I wanted everyone to like me, I wanted to be social, I wanted to know everyone. And I wanted to be one of the cool kids. .\u2009.\u2009. And I found that in partying.\u201d\n

\nMusic blared by the pool that night. Wyatt would recount to police later that her friend Trey gave her a water bottle full of lemonade and whiskey; and her friend Hannah shared a few gulps of her red wine; and her friend Erin shared her Smirnoff and her friend Kyle shared his beer. She was feeling good, light and free \u2014 her mom had given her permission to spend the night at the party house, which meant she didn\u2019t have to worry about driving home in her condition. The party wore on, and since Wyatt hadn\u2019t brought a bathing suit, friends playfully tossed her in the pool fully clothed. When she got in the front cab of a classmate\u2019s truck sometime after 11, her clothes were still wet.\n

\nThe two boys driving her didn\u2019t seem to mind. Both were 17 and seniors \u2014 a well-to-do, stocky football player and an outgoing soccer player with wide, dark eyes and curly black hair. Wyatt had met them only in passing before; she recalls that they told her they were going to get food, then return. The three of them chatted and listened to rap while they drove, and by this point Wyatt was feeling drunk. They had their pick of fast-food joints; the house was practically flanked by a pair of Jack in the Box locations, and a Wendy\u2019s and a Whataburger weren\u2019t far off. They passed a Pizza Hut and a McDonald\u2019s en route to what turned out to be their actual destination, a storage shed on the rear of a friend\u2019s property.\n



\nLater, the soccer player would tell his friends that Wyatt had said she needed to urinate, so they had pulled over into the dark woods to let her relieve herself on the ground, at which point she had fallen and scraped her elbow.\n

\nWyatt\u2019s account is far darker. As she told police at the time, and recounted to me, the boys told her they wanted to pick up some more beer when they pulled up outside a friend\u2019s shed, hidden off a back road in tangled trees and undergrowth. Crime-scene photos would later show that a pair of doors fixed with a slide bolt opened to a cavernously dark space filled with the odds and ends of family life \u2014 sacked-up Christmas decorations, stacks of old photos, spare furniture and a series of buck heads mounted on opposite walls. A wooden ladder led to a loft with dirty pillows and blankets piled on the plywood. Wyatt slipped and fell on her climb up to the loft \u2014 that part, she would always remember. The beer stash wasn\u2019t there.\n

\nOnce Wyatt reached the loft, she recalled, the football player instructed her to remove her clothes. She was incredulous at first, assuming it was a joke. \u201cWhat did you say?\u201d a detective asked her in an hour-long interview five days later. \u201cNo,\u201d the 16-year-old answered with a scoff. When the boy persisted, she took a step in retreat, but tripped and fell backward, bloodying her elbow. Wyatt remembered saying \u201cstop,\u201d and then the same boy tugging off her \u201cskort\u201d (an athletic skirt-and-shorts combo used in cheerleading) and panties, moving over her and penetrating her. \u201cI was just like, \u2018Stop, please. Stop,\u2019\u2009\u201d Wyatt told the detective.\n

\nThe boy on top of her rolled to his back, pulling Wyatt with him, though she struggled; it was then that the other boy approached. He forced his penis into her anus, Wyatt told the detective, while the other boy was still raping her vaginally. <\/a>You don\u2019t shy away from the graphic details, which are startling in their horror. What was your rationale for describing the assault in such detail?<\/span>We wanted to be as clear about what had happened as possible, in part because so much about the story had been veiled for so long \u2014 no contemporaneous news reports included this level of detail, or anything approaching it, for instance. I think that factored into a lot of locals dismissing the whole thing; they just did not know what had happened. We also didn\u2019t want to sensationalize it, so it\u2019s as matter-of-fact as it appears in the police reports.<\/span><\/span> Moments passed like that, with Wyatt frozen in shock, staring into darkness. \u201cMy body was there,\u201d Wyatt told me in 2015, but \u201cmy mind was .\u2009.\u2009. somewhere completely different. And I just remember praying a lot and not taking in my surroundings. It was more like, I want to get out of my surroundings and out of myself.\u201d When she mustered the ability to fight back again, she said, she was able to push the boy behind her away, roll off the other and then scramble against a wall.\n

\nWyatt couldn\u2019t immediately recall, in her conversation with police, if either boy had ejaculated; all she knew was that the football player told her to perform oral sex on them afterward, saying they hadn\u2019t finished. But she refused and snatched a few pieces of clothing from the floor, then managed to climb down unsteadily from the loft. She had hastily redressed in just her skort and top, because she was unable to locate her sports bra or panties. She fell again as she staggered back to the truck, but she made it, and the boys followed. There was darkness and silence on the ride back, and the glow of blue lights from the truck\u2019s dashboard. Back at the house, Wyatt stumbled out of the same pickup she had left in less than an hour before.\n

\nThere were a few partygoers still gathered in the driveway. Wyatt approached them immediately. According to her account and that of one of the classmates present, Wyatt told an adult and two classmates right then and there what happened. And she reported her rape to police the next day, when she underwent a sexual assault exam at the hospital. Police were at the shed taking crime-scene photos in less than 24 hours \u2014 so quickly, in fact, that Wyatt\u2019s sports bra and panties were still damp on the floor. <\/a>What made it possible to reconstruct the assault and other events from so long ago?<\/span>The police reports containing Amber\u2019s original account was critical, as was the account she gave me in 2015, which was more or less identical to her 2006 interview. We were able to corroborate the account with other pieces of the police record: crime scene photos, hospital records, contemporaneous witness interviews. And we corroborated all of those pieces with further interviews with experts \u2014 clarifying, for instance, what we could deduce from Amber\u2019s injuries as listed in her sexual assault exam, from her toxicology report, etc. It became the kind of Bible of the story because it was only extremely lightly redacted. The only stuff that was taken out of it was Social Security numbers, basically. Because of that, it was very easy to go back and find things. And we had whole records of interviews, interviews transcripts with other students, witnesses. We had the police narrative, the incident reports. Their handwritten notes from the interviews that they did, as well as the kind of transcripts themselves; we had tapes, which appears in the story of an interview. And we had forensics. We had everything. So, you know, we could go back and even talk to, you know, the very nurse who conducted the sexual assault exam.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

PART TWO<\/h3>\n

Forces of habit<\/em><\/h4>\nThe story of Amber Wyatt\u2019s assault begins in some sense a decade earlier, with another assault \u2014 and another failure of irresponsible adults and their children to face consequences. In 1996, another 16-year-old Arlington girl was allegedly sexually assaulted at another high school party, and another opportunity to prosecute those responsible was ignored. And, with that, another moment of clarity that could have turned toward reform instead degenerated into a rally for the guilty. <\/a>How did you learn about this earlier assault?<\/span>I learned about this earlier assault in the process of conducting interviews with different Arlington school principals about the alcohol policy. They let me in on the Lynn Hale policy, and investigating the origins of the Lynn Hale policy led to contemporaneous news reports about this assault. I was pretty stunned by how similar the stories were.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nOn Sept. 13, 1996, a 16-year-old junior at Arlington High School was allegedly sexually assaulted at a party while she was drunk. According to contemporaneous news reports, she alleged that dozens of her peers stood by as others assaulted her with a condom-topped broomstick, exposed their genitals and urinated on her. <\/a>Any reluctance about using these details? How would you explain it to a reader who might complain, \u201cThis is a family newspaper?\u201d<\/span>Again, I just felt like it was necessary to be clear to drive home that we weren\u2019t dealing with minor incidents here, but serious, shocking, brutal stuff. Nobody complained about that. (Someone did complain about our use of \u2018panties\u2019 instead of \u2018underwear,\u2019 which they found infantilizing and somewhat sexualized. I just used the word because it was how the police and Amber had referred to the evidence.)<\/span><\/span> The girl was hospitalized, but no sexual assault charges were filed against her assailants. The town helped see to that.\n

\nPolice interviewed some 35 students after the incident; none supported the girl\u2019s allegations. Coupled with the victim\u2019s broken memory, this meant police were never able to bring any perpetrator to justice for the sexual assault. Instead, police issued simple assault and disorderly conduct citations to a smattering of teens who had been at the party, a light reprimand given the circumstances. Nonetheless, some parents resented even those meager reprisals.\n

\nThe parents\u2019 objections might have remained at the muted level of privileged suburbanites grousing over traffic tickets had it not been for Lynn Hale, then superintendent of the Arlington Independent School District, who took it upon herself to try to prevent another such episode.\n

\nLess than two weeks after the girl\u2019s report, Hale told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News that she wasn\u2019t convinced the district was \u201cimplementing the appropriate consequences .\u2009.\u2009. for students who drink.\u201d And she followed through, instituting a district-wide policy under which any student caught at a location where alcohol or drugs were being used would be banned from extracurricular activities for the entire school year, regardless of whether police cited them for use. <\/a>It seems like you spent a lot of time in the archives of the local papers. Did you find any surprises as you were going through them?<\/span>I did. They were digitized, fortunately. The biggest surprise I found was this: There was another story from that same year, 2006, that I had heard but never really believed \u2014 that police had found three dazed, partially naked girls in the woods outside a park in my city at dawn one summer morning. And that turned out to be true. They, too, had been drinking alcohol; some boys had apparently been with them, and then left them there.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nParents revolted. Seven families of students affected by the policy filed suit, and in January 1997, a local judge invited them to debate the policy with members of the school board. After meeting with the students and their parents and considering the arguments of the school board and its attorney, the judge, saying he was speaking \u201cas a parent,\u201d thanked Hale for her attempt to do something \u2014 anything \u2014 about the problem. And then the judge effectively overturned Hale\u2019s policy, reinstating some 20 students to their extracurricular activities.\n

\nHale didn\u2019t remain in her post much longer to see what would become of the phenomenon she had observed and tried to halt. By the summer of 1998, she had already been replaced as superintendent by Mac Bernd, who eased the anti-drinking policy to include a penalty of just six weeks for first-time offenders. \u201cI have a somewhat jaundiced view of how much control we do have over teenagers,\u201d Bernd, several years retired, told me in 2015 in an Arlington restaurant lined with framed drawings of Texas college and high school mascots. He wanted to preserve, Bernd said, \u201can opportunity for redemption.\u201d\n

\nIt\u2019s impossible to know whether Hale\u2019s tougher policy would have given pause to anyone present at the 2006 party that Wyatt attended. <\/a>Did you interview Hale?<\/span>I tried but wasn\u2019t successful. She\u2019s since left Arlington for the Galveston area, and is retired.<\/span><\/span> For a deterrent to be effective, consequences must seem real. And it\u2019s easy to see how, with Hale\u2019s rule a vanquished memory and the case that sparked it an item of urban legend, a pair of Arlington teenagers with ample opportunity and bad intentions might have reasonably concluded no harm would come to them should they wantonly violate rules, policies or people. They would have been exactly right. <\/a>This is another paragraph that separates this story from traditional reportage. What gave you the authority to draw these conclusions and to do so without any attribution?<\/span>Partially, just the freedom of the form \u2014 that we did this in editorial, where the author has more room for voice. And then partially because I was there, and I lived in that environment, and I remembered what it felt like.<\/span><\/span>\n\n



\n\nAnd so it came to pass that August evening that Martin senior Arthur Aven stood in a suburban driveway facing a decision too momentous for his years: Believe the girl who had pulled him aside to tell him that she had just been sexually assaulted \u2014 or believe one of her alleged assailants, who was among his closest friends. <\/a>Did you learn their names? If so, why not use them?<\/span>We did know their names. Deciding whether or not to name them was a pretty long, protracted thing. We went back and forth a lot. Ultimately, because the charges were not brought against them and they were 17 at the time, the decision was made not to use their full names.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nAbout 45 minutes earlier, by Aven\u2019s recollection, homeowner Cindy Marks had asked him to take Wyatt home. (Marks would later explain to police that unnamed kids had asked her to make Wyatt leave, because Wyatt was being, in her words, \u201cobnoxious.\u201d) But Aven didn\u2019t have his car; he had planned to spend the night with the soccer player and was counting on him for a ride. And so the soccer player had volunteered to take Wyatt home, along with the football player, then circle back and pick up Aven.\n

\nPerhaps Aven was relieved. He told police that Wyatt had been hanging on him all night, flirting with him in the pool, loudly declaring to no one in particular that she was \u201cgonna f— this guy tonight.\u201d But he wasn\u2019t interested; he just wanted to enjoy the party. With the two boys and Wyatt on their way home, it had seemed as if the night was winding down.\n

\nBut then the soccer player returned to the Marks residence with Wyatt \u2014 and she immediately took Aven aside, sobbing hysterically, brandishing a bleeding wound on her arm and telling him that she had just been raped.\n

\n\u201cIt was hard for me to really believe anything at the time,\u201d Aven told me, sitting in a Fort Worth Starbucks this April. His short-cropped blond hair swept up from his forehead in a stubborn cowlick, just as it had in his varsity basketball yearbook photo back in 2006. <\/a>Was this your yearbook? Did you have other sources that enabled you to recreate those days\/these characters?<\/span>This was my 2006 yearbook. I also used old Facebook and MySpace photos and videos to recreate the characters as they had been at the time.<\/span><\/span> In school, he had been well liked and quietly bright. He had been close with the soccer player at the time, and they remained friendly enough years later that the soccer player was part of Aven\u2019s wedding party. But Aven still seemed deeply troubled, both in 2006 and when I spoke to him, by what had happened that night. <\/a>What made you conclude that he still seemed troubled?<\/span>He was willing to talk to me, for one, and willing to talk to the police at the time. That made him one of a very small number of people, especially boys, who were willing to do that. And he\u2019s a very thoughtful, reflective person \u2014 meeting with him, it was clear he had seriously considered all of this, and that he had a very mature perspective on it.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nAven wrote in the statement he provided to police that, as soon as Wyatt told him she had been raped, he \u201casked Mrs. Marks and a girl named Carlye Bowers to come over to where me and Amber were standing. Amber repeated exactly what she told me to Mrs. Marks and Carlye.\u201d Marks, 49 at the time, did not call the police. Instead, she suggested that Wyatt go to an upstairs room in her house, where she lay down. Bowers declined to comment for this article. <\/a>How did you track these people all these years after the assault?<\/span>I had a phone book from my hometown from around that time, actually that my Mom had and we had an updated one. They became really useful in finding these folks. I would also use white pages.com., a premium subscription. Sometimes I had to find people’s family members first and then I would be able to get a phone number for them.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nWyatt was disoriented and confused, Aven recalled in his statement. She even misidentified one of the two boys she said assaulted her \u2014 the football player \u2014 instead naming a third boy who had been at the party as one of the perpetrators. But according to Marks, the football player had come back with the soccer player and Wyatt, and then left in his own truck. And those were the two boys Wyatt would tell the police had raped her: the ones who had been with her in the truck.\n

\nIn his statement, Aven recalled standing in a nearby hallway with Bowers, Marks and his friend, discussing what had happened. The friend seemed surprised by Wyatt\u2019s accusation, Aven said, and offered a competing version of events: On the way to Wyatt\u2019s house, she said that she needed to urinate. Rather than stopping at a local fast-food joint or gas station, the boys figured it would be best to pull over behind a friend\u2019s storage shed and let Wyatt pee on the ground. She fell down as she got out of the truck, Aven recalled his friend saying, which was how she had come by the bloody abrasion on her arm.\n

\nSomewhere near the close of this narration, Wyatt appeared in the door of the guest room, \u201ctoo afraid to be alone,\u201d Aven wrote. She asked whether Aven would stay with her until she fell asleep, and he agreed. Aven went into Marks\u2019 guest room with Wyatt, helped her into bed and did his best to comfort her. He pulled out a trundle bed alongside her and lay down facing her. Wyatt recalled in her interview with police that Marks appeared at some point and gave her boxers and a T-shirt to sleep in, which she changed into. With Aven at her side, Wyatt eventually fell asleep.\n

\nThe next day, Aven woke up alone. Wyatt was gone, the party was long over, and the nightmarish evening had given way to an ordinary summer morning in suburbia. And the boy who had been trusted with the markedly adult task of comforting a terrified, injured girl now called his father to come pick him up from the Marks home. <\/a>This section is relentless accretion of facts. What were your sources?<\/span>Contemporaneous police interviews and subsequent interviews, along with the different physical descriptions in the police reports \u2014 in the hospital records, for example, a nurse notes Amber isn\u2019t wearing her own clothing, but rather boxers shorts and a t-shirt that don\u2019t belong to her; the police describe those pieces of clothing in their evidence collection notes the same way. So a lot of the very small details came from that kind of cross-checking.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nWhen police arrived there a day and a half later, after Wyatt filed a complaint, they found Cindy Marks polite and respectful while they gathered the bedding Wyatt had slept on and searched for any additional clothes she may have left behind. But when Marks made her sworn statement several weeks later \u2014 after canceling her initial appointment with police \u2014 the story she supplied differed vastly from the version of events Aven and Wyatt had related.\n

\n\u201cAt approx 11:30 pm I was shutting down the party,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThe kids told me Amber was being obnoxious and to get her to leave. I asked [the soccer player] to take her home. He agreed and left. At approx 20-60 minutes [the soccer player] arrived back at the house.\u201d\n

\nOn the same October day that Marks wrote her statement, a detective interviewed her on camera for an hour and 45 minutes. In the video, Marks chewed gum while crisply answering questions. \u201cNo one seemed out of control to me except for Amber,\u201d she said, \u201cand she seemed kinda, I don\u2019t know what it was, drugged up or something.\u201d\n

\nMarks\u2019 answers appear curated <\/a>Interesting word choice. What did you mean by it?<\/span>I think Marks had certain goals in her interview. We knew from internal police emails recovered in the police record that they had considered charging her, because minors had been consuming alcohol on her property. The information she gave police seemed to be selected to convey a certain impression that other information from the police file didn\u2019t appear to support.<\/span><\/span> to emphasize her lack of culpability in the underage drinking that had transpired in her backyard. She claimed she didn\u2019t believe Wyatt to be under the influence of alcohol. \u201cI didn\u2019t feel like she was drunk because I didn\u2019t know they were drinking,\u201d she said. \u201cI figured she was on drugs, because I\u2019ve also heard that her stomach has been pumped for drugs.\u201d (Wyatt says that her stomach had never been pumped after drug use as a teen.) Yet Aven and Wyatt each admitted to having been drinking at the Marks party, and the school\u2019s investigation would later conclude there had certainly been alcohol consumption in Marks\u2019 backyard that night.\n

\nEven more striking, Marks also denied ever hearing anything about a rape that night, from Wyatt, Aven or anyone else. \u201cYou know, I just felt like she needed to go to sleep,\u201d was her final analysis of Wyatt\u2019s condition in her interview with police. Reached by phone in the summer of 2015, Marks declined to comment for this article. She also has not responded to many other recent attempts I\u2019ve made, including over this summer, to get her side of the story.\n

\nIn her video interview, Marks mocked how Wyatt had spoken that night, heavy and slow. The main fact about Wyatt circulating among the cheerleading moms, Marks said, \u201cwas that she does quad bars,\u201d a street name for the prescription drug Xanax. She claimed that Amber had stolen her daughter\u2019s sunglasses a year or more ago, though another student had returned them. She told the detective the alleged rapists were \u201cgood boys,\u201d emphasized Wyatt\u2019s \u201chorrible reputation\u201d for drug and alcohol use, and said she found it \u201codd\u201d that Wyatt\u2019s mother never called to ask what had happened, as if that had been the greatest abdication of responsibility to take place during that long night. <\/a>A not-so-subtle dig, yet another example of the way opinion permeates the story. What gave you the authority to render these judgments?<\/span>Just a moral conscience, I think \u2014 being upfront about my role as a bystander as well as a reporter helps to ground the fact that these moral judgments are mine. I hope so, anyway.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

PART THREE<\/h3>\n

Writing on the walls<\/em><\/h4>\nWyatt\u2019s mother, Lisa Wyatt, knew something was wrong when her daughter parked her car in front of their home early that morning. For one thing, her daughter hadn\u2019t slept late, as Lisa Wyatt had expected. And she was acting strangely. \u201cAnd finally, I\u2019m like, what is going on with you?\u201d Lisa Wyatt recalled when we spoke this year. \u201cAnd she just blurted it out. I mean, she just said, \u2018I got raped last night.\u2019\u2009\u201d <\/a>Some narratives eschew attribution, under the belief that it interrupts the flow. Instead, a note about sources will often be appended. You attribute throughout the story. Why?<\/span>Style, mainly, although I wasn\u2019t always happy with how the attributions did interrupt the flow But we wanted to be clear with readers.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nBy a little after noon, Amber Wyatt and her mother were at Arlington Memorial Hospital, where Wyatt awaited a sexual assault exam. She began the process of reporting her assault to the police, who met the pair at the hospital. Once on the scene, Officer Pamela Halferty observed Wyatt to have visible bodily injuries and found her to be \u201csporadically tearful in increasing intensity\u201d as she recounted the events of the preceding night. In the waiting room prior to her exam, Wyatt also received a disturbing call on her cellphone: the football player, angrily demanding to know why she was saying he had raped her. (\u201cBecause you did,\u201d Wyatt told police she replied.)\n

\nNurse Della Schiavo provided sexual assault exams at Arlington Memorial Hospital for more than 10 years and was on call the day Wyatt arrived. Schiavo conducted Wyatt\u2019s exam and took detailed notes, sketching her injuries on annotated diagrams while Wyatt laid on an exam table with her feet in stirrups. Schiavo noted that Wyatt had abrasions to her elbow, both ankles, and buttocks, along with a scratch on her inner thigh. She also recorded vaginal and anal tearing, along with redness and abrasions.\n

\n\u201cThe examination that I did was consistent with what [Wyatt] said,\u201d Schiavo told me when I contacted her this May to discuss her findings. \u201cThat girl was raped.\u201d As I read her exam notes aloud to her over the phone, Schiavo began to fill in the details on her own. She remembered Wyatt\u2019s case all these years later, right down to the fact that she was never called to court to testify about it. <\/a>Why did the nurse speak with you?<\/span>Initially, she was kind of skeptical. When I told her this never went to court, that’s when she wanted to be involved.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nSchiavo took a total of 12 swabs and smears from Wyatt\u2019s genitals, and swabbed her saliva twice. She also collected urine for toxicological analysis. Even though Schiavo collected Wyatt\u2019s urine sample more than 12 hours after the estimated time of her assault, there was still a small amount of alcohol in her system, along with evidence of cannabis and prescription sedatives. Wyatt told police she hadn\u2019t ingested any of those drugs that day but that she had earlier in the week.\n



\nBruce Goldberger is chief of forensic medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine, where he has practiced forensic toxicology for nearly 25 years and provided expert testimony in hundreds of court cases. I read Wyatt\u2019s toxicology report to him and asked what could be gleaned from it. \u201cBarring a [urinary tract infection] or other confounding factor,\u201d Goldberger said, \u201cthe concentration of alcohol in the urine supports a blood-alcohol concentration earlier in the day that would be sufficient to impair.\u201d\n

\nIn other words, Wyatt was arguably too drunk, under Texas law, to be able to legally consent to sexual activity. At trial, prosecutors would have had to prove both that Wyatt was too intoxicated to properly assess the situation and render consent, and that the boys knew Wyatt was in such a state. And given that multiple people, by Aven and Marks\u2019 accounts, had commented on how intoxicated Wyatt seemed at the party, and that Marks herself had deemed Wyatt too affected to drive, it seems they would have had ample reason to consider her thoroughly inebriated.\n

\nGoldberger also pointed out that the injuries to Wyatt\u2019s genitals suggest that what occurred wasn\u2019t consensual. \u201cTrauma to the genitals can be used as a sign of sexual assault, particularly in the case where the victim is impaired,\u201d Goldberger explained; when a victim is heavily intoxicated, \u201cthere\u2019s no possibility of the physiological response that facilitates intercourse.\u201d Jamye Coffman, medical director of the Child Advocacy Resources and Evaluation Team at Cook Children\u2019s hospital in Fort Worth, agreed that Wyatt\u2019s injuries were consistent with her story, though not necessarily diagnostic, as is common in sexual assault cases. \u201cI tell all our victims,\u201d Coffman told me this August, \u201cDon\u2019t count on the legal system to give you your closure.\u201d <\/a>Here you veer for the first time from personal recollections and details from records to opinions from experts? Why did you break from the narrative to do so? How did you select these two sources?<\/span>We just wanted to give readers maximal context to judge the reported details we were providing. That was the logic behind bringing in expert voices \u2014 to help interpret these details. I chose Goldberger for his expertise in toxicology and Coffman for her experience in dealing with these specific kinds of sex crimes \u2014 against minors \u2014 and her relationship to the region.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nWhile Wyatt was examined, Arlington police officers set out to gather evidence. Some went to the shed, where they found her black sports bra on the particleboard floor of the upper loft, and her panties on the concrete below. Others went to Marks\u2019 house, where they searched for the T-shirt and skort she had worn the night before; all she had worn home were the boxers and T-shirt she said Marks had given her to sleep in. Police recovered the sheets Wyatt had slept on in Marks\u2019 guest bedroom, as well as two T-shirts that matched the description of Wyatt\u2019s \u2014 from Marks\u2019 washing machine. (\u201cI find that very strange,\u201d Lisa Wyatt, Amber\u2019s mother, told me in an interview this May. \u201cIf one of my daughter\u2019s friends was here in the same situation, am I going to wash the child\u2019s clothes? Nope.\u201d) Wyatt\u2019s skort, as far as police evidence records reflect, was never found.\n

\nWith her body searched, swabbed and documented and her urine sample sent off for analysis, the next task for Wyatt was to give a thorough recounting of her assault to Ricardo \u201cRico\u201d Lucero, a detective in the Arlington Police Department\u2019s Crimes Against Children Unit. Lucero, an earnest and serious investigator, questioned Wyatt about the night\u2019s events as conscientiously as possible. But their interview, which lasted more than an hour, was grueling nonetheless.\n

\nFor Wyatt, some memories were clearer than others. She could remember the ladder to the loft inside the storage shed, and the guest room she had slept in after it was all over. She knew she had never found her sports bra or panties; police would later ask her to identify them, having recovered them from the shed.\n

\nThroughout her interview, Wyatt seemed stunned still, dazed. \u201cI was just laying there,\u201d she said at one point, trying to account for why she didn\u2019t struggle harder than she had. \u201cI just felt like there was nothing I can do.\u201d\n

\nBy Aug. 18, Lucero received a memo from the Tarrant County medical examiner\u2019s office confirming that Wyatt\u2019s vaginal and anal swabs had both been positive for \u201cacid phosphatase and spermatozoa, which confirm the presence of semen.\u201d (Coffman speculated that semen could have migrated during the several hours between Wyatt\u2019s alleged assault and the exam.) On Sept. 28, a judge signed bodily fluid search warrants for both boys\u2019 saliva; Lucero took the swabs himself that afternoon.\n

\nIt wasn\u2019t until November that the lab returned a report comparing the boys\u2019 swabs with the samples taken as part of Wyatt\u2019s rape kit. It showed the semen was a match for the soccer player.\n

\nAnd that was the paradox of the episode. The rumor \u2014 at least initially, and certainly in the soccer player\u2019s initial account to Aven \u2014 wasn\u2019t that Wyatt consented to sex with the two boys, but that they never had sex at all. Yet the tone of murmurs around the school indicated that students believed the exact opposite: that Wyatt, perhaps intoxicated, had agreed to sex and then regretted it, and that, in accusing the boys of rape, caused trouble not only for herself but also for her classmates at Martin. Aven, in his statement to police, said he thought, despite the soccer player\u2019s denials, that some consensual sexual encounter took place in the shed that night. Meanwhile, at the school, an internal investigation quickly began into students\u2019 alcohol use, which resulted in athletes from four different sports being removed from their extracurricular activities for six weeks. <\/a>The videos that accompany the story are especially compelling. How would you describe your collaboration with videographer Gillian Brockell?<\/span>Gillian came with me to Texas for one leg of reporting, to shoot on-scene; she is an extremely hard worker, very creative, imaginative and skilled. The story just flatly would not be the same without her; it wouldn\u2019t be anywhere near as powerful or wholly told. I did what I could with images in the writing, but she really brought them across.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nWyatt became the bull\u2019s eye of an angry backlash. As Liz Gebhardt, a close friend of Wyatt\u2019s who remained by her side throughout the tumultuous period that followed, recalled: \u201cEveryone started blaming [Wyatt] because she said something, and if she would have kept her mouth shut then nothing would have ever happened.\u201d With 3,350 students, <\/a>So specific. Source?<\/span>AISD (Arlington Independent School District) data from the time.<\/span><\/span> it was hard to contain the spread of malicious recrimination and even harder to maintain a sense of proportion.\n

\nKids hurled insults at Wyatt in the halls and casually chatted about the news in class. Many of her former friends would no longer associate with her. Wyatt says she received threats and slurs by text messages, people telling her to kill herself, saying she got what was coming to her. Wyatt\u2019s friendships with her former cheerleading pals grew brittle and strained. \u201cMaybe it was me,\u201d she speculated in 2015. \u201cI mean, I totally changed.\u201d\n

\nOne night in September, text and MySpace messages began circulating among Martin teens who wanted to show support for the accused by writing \u201cFAITH\u201d on their cars. The lurid acronym \u2014 \u201cf— Amber in the head\u201d \u2014 began appearing on rear windows the following morning, metastasizing <\/a>Your diction is inspired, inspiring \u2014 \u201cnascent\u201d for instant, and the cancer terminology here, even though it might drive a less sophisticated reader to a dictionary. Does that worry you?<\/span> Yeah, my own writing bothers me more than anyone else\u2019s writing bothers me. I aspire to a nice, elegant, bare simplicity that my actual writing isn\u2019t even close to.<\/span><\/span> as quickly as the rumors had. Even Arthur Aven wrote \u201cFAITH\u201d on his car.\n

\nOn Sept. 29, a Friday morning, spray-painted graffiti appeared on Martin\u2019s exterior wall. It read something like, \u201cAmber is a Whore\u201d; the exact verbiage has been lost to time. Contemporaneous news reports didn\u2019t record the vulgar wording, and Wyatt\u2019s father, Mark Wyatt, who spoke with school authorities about it that morning, didn\u2019t commit it to memory. By the time I saw the wall that day, heading inside from health class in a temporary building behind the school, custodians had already covered it with butcher paper. <\/a>The events seem seared in your memory. Did you take any steps to confirm their accuracy?<\/span>This was all sourced from contemporaneous local reporting, and confirmed in interviews with Mark Wyatt, Laura Jones, and others. We also went back to the school in person, where I checked my memory against the actual physical layout of the building.<\/span><\/span> District officials issued a $1,000 reward for information about who was responsible, but the money was never claimed, and the culprits were never punished.\n



\nThe graffiti infuriated Laura Jones, Martin\u2019s principal at the time. She took to the morning announcements, broadcast by loudspeaker throughout the entire school, and pleaded with students to consider how their actions reflected on them and affected others. \u201cBut they all laughed\u201d at the announcement, Juliann Warner, a Martin teacher for some 20 years, recalled to me in a May interview. \u201cEven at the end of the year, they were just always making fun of that thing.\u201d <\/a>Was all the reporting done before you started writing?<\/span>No, I drafted quite a bit before finishing up the reporting. My editor was extremely helpful in recommending further and further avenues to pursue in terms of reporting \u2014 we just didn\u2019t want to leave anything undone.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\nFor Pam Millican, the mother of two Martin cheerleaders, Wyatt\u2019s case became an eerie and unsettling cautionary tale. \u201cWhat really ticked me off is the herd mentality of everybody,\u201d Millican said in an interview this April, \u201cof the cheerleaders and football players and all those queen bees and wannabes who basically sided with the football players and said that, oh, she wanted it, and it was consensual.\u201d\n

\nElsewhere in Arlington, Sharon Kale, the mother of Wyatt\u2019s friend Liz Gebhardt, argued with one of her employees, who suspected Wyatt had lied. \u201cAnd I just said, \u2018But I know Amber, and why would she say something like that and go through the whole examination and all of that?\u2019\u2009\u201d Kale recalled in a 2015 interview. By then, adults had joined in on the rumor-spreading and ostracizing. Lisa Wyatt, Wyatt\u2019s mother, found herself cast out of the small group of cheerleading moms she had dined and spent time with since Amber Wyatt was in junior high.\n

\nWyatt, meanwhile, was moved to an alternative education campus after the graffiti incident, where she would stay for the remainder of the school year, an exile in her own city. The febrile climate that had consumed Martin since school began gradually cooled. But the criminal investigation was still ongoing. It was up to the criminal-justice system to do its work, or not.\n\n

PART FOUR<\/h3>\n

Prey among prey<\/em><\/h4>\n<\/a>Did you name the parts?<\/span>I titled them, because I was working from an outline structure. A couple of the titles changed draft-to-draft, but most of them stayed.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nFormer sergeant Cheryl Johnson of the Fort Worth Police Department started counting around 2007, the year that Wyatt\u2019s father said her case went before a Tarrant County grand jury. As head of Fort Worth\u2019s adult sex crimes unit, she was sending dozens of rape cases to the Tarrant County district attorney\u2019s office to be presented to the county\u2019s grand jury. But again and again, the grand jury had \u201cno-billed\u201d her cases, deciding not to indict \u2014 even when they seemed open and shut to Johnson.\n

\n\u201cWe had cases where there were photographs and confessions from the suspects that were no-billed,\u201d Johnson told me in 2015 in the tidy living room of her Fort Worth home. One case in particular stuck with her: A man admitted to giving a woman drugs that would render her unconscious \u2014 and then raping her after she had passed out and photographing the act. The victim was sent the photographs of her own rape, which she turned over to police. Still, the grand jury decided not to indict.\n

\nSo Johnson began to keep track of what became of her cases once she sent them to the district attorney\u2019s office. Journalist Tim Madigan at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram caught up with Johnson during his own investigation into Tarrant\u2019s no-bill rates and incorporated her findings. Published<\/a>\u00a0in 2012, Madigan\u2019s report found that Tarrant County\u2019s no-bill rate for alleged acquaintance rapes was 51 percent. By contrast, the city of Austin\u2019s no-bill rate for the same crime was 13 percent. For whatever reason, Tarrant County simply wasn\u2019t deciding to indict in such cases at the same rates as other locales.\n

\nTo this day, different stakeholders have different theories about the cause of the discrepancy \u2014 and some dispute whether it even existed.\n

\nJohnson cited prosecutors\u2019 failure to call detectives to testify before grand juries as a matter of routine procedure, pointing out that, sometimes, assistant district attorneys\u2019 presentations of these complicated cases to grand jurors took only a few minutes.\n

\nFormer Tarrant prosecutors pointed to the grand jurors themselves, who, before 2015, were appointed on a non-random basis labeled the \u201cpick-a-pal\u201d system by critics. Tarrant\u2019s large volume of cases demanded that grand jurors sometimes meet several times a week, meaning that those selected to serve often fit a particular profile: older, retired, male and perhaps, as Fort Worth defense attorney and former prosecutor Leticia Martinez told me, more willing to believe that \u201coh, these young people today .\u2009.\u2009. they\u2019ll do anything.\u201d\n

\nThen there was the matter of the district attorneys, and whether they took allegations of acquaintance rape seriously.\n

\nTim Curry, the district attorney at the time of Wyatt\u2019s case, died in 2009. But when Madigan\u2019s investigation was published, during then-District Attorney Joe Shannon Jr.\u2019s tenure, Shannon penned an op-ed in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram disputing Madigan\u2019s report on the problem. When I spoke with him this year, Shannon still insisted that, with \u201cthis consensual rape stuff,\u201d victims frequently elected not to participate in prosecutions after their initial reports, accounting for Tarrant\u2019s high number of no-bills. \u201cI\u2019m not going to try to prosecute somebody knowing full well that I can\u2019t prove it,\u201d he said. <\/a>Did this outrage you? You lay it out without comment instead of bringing the essay voice into it. Why?<\/span>After Madigan\u2019s expos\u00e9, a new district attorney, Sharen Wilson, won the office in Tarrant County. Despite repeated requests for an interview, Wilson never agreed to speak with me for this article. But she offered a statement through a spokeswoman which seemed to suggest that, under her administration, whatever had gone awry in past eras has been set right now: \u201cSince DA Wilson implemented changes upon taking office,\u201d the statement read, \u201cthe indictment rate for sexual assaults in Tarrant County has dramatically increased, from 60.92% in 2015 to 81.25% in 2017.\u201d<\/span><\/span>\n\n



\n\nIn Wyatt\u2019s case, it isn\u2019t exactly clear what happened. But signs of the troubled system Johnson detected and Madigan exposed emerge. Detective Lucero confirmed to me that he was not called to testify to a grand jury in Wyatt\u2019s case. Wyatt herself was willing to testify before a grand jury but was never called.\n

\nAnd, despite the soccer player\u2019s semen found in Wyatt\u2019s body and the injuries she sustained, neither of the boys were questioned by police. When I asked Lucero how he felt reading over Wyatt\u2019s case file in 2015 and reflecting on the non-indictment, his mind immediately went to the fact that he was never able to speak with either boy. \u201cSpeaking to the perpetrator, the suspect, it\u2019s huge,\u201d he said, \u201cand it can make or break a case.\u201d But aside from presenting the boys for DNA swabs when subpoenaed, Lucero said, the boys\u2019 attorneys did not make their clients available for questioning. When Lucero communicated with the boys\u2019 attorneys, they refused even to answer whether their clients argued that any sexual encounter had been consensual. I attempted to contact both boys by telephone, email and mail and through family for this article; though a friend of the soccer player reported he knew I was trying to get in touch, neither of them returned my messages seeking contact. <\/a>You certainly went the extra mile to be fair.<\/span>We wanted to give everybody involved maximal opportunities to respond to our questions, so that took patience and some creativity. From my point of view, getting to the truth was always the point, so I was extremely hopeful about eventually hearing back, though that didn\u2019t end up happening. But I wanted to try everything.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nWhy did the district attorney\u2019s office not pursue the case? Alicia Cooper, the assistant district attorney who handled Wyatt\u2019s case, declined repeated requests by telephone, email and letter to comment for this article.\n

\nNo doubt, it would have posed a challenge for prosecutors. \u201cI know the DA\u2019s office would\u2019ve been faced with an uphill battle at trial,\u201d Malcolm Bales, a retired former U.S. attorney for Texas\u2019s Eastern District, which borders Tarrant, told me. Defense lawyers, he said, \u201cwould seize on her intoxication, her inability to clearly recall things.\u201d But Bales was still surprised that Tarrant\u2019s prosecutors hadn\u2019t managed to so much as indict anyone involved. \u201cIf it had been me, I definitely would have prosecuted [the soccer player] with the physical evidence,\u201d Bales said, \u201cand I would have gone to trial. With some cases, it\u2019s hard \u2014 they\u2019re hard to prosecute. But you prosecute them for the victims, for accountability and for the State of Texas.\u201d\n



\nBut that wasn\u2019t how it played out. Wyatt\u2019s father, Mark Wyatt, remembered receiving a call that he believes came from Cooper in February 2007, advising him that there would be no legal consequences for the two boys Wyatt had accused of the rape. \u201cI got a call .\u2009.\u2009. that they\u2019ve chosen not to indict because it was a \u2018he said, she said\u2019 thing,\u201d he said. Mark Wyatt was furious, disconsolate.\n

\nBecause the case never went to trial, rumors that Amber Wyatt had either recanted or dropped charges blossomed, bolstering the notion that she had invented the entire thing. Mark Wyatt still believes that if his daughter\u2019s case had gone to trial, the years of suffering that followed for her\u2014 the spiral of drug abuse and addiction \u2014 would not have been so severe. \u201cEven if it had gone to trial and they would have found them not guilty, at least they would have been on trial for it,\u201d he said. \u201cI would hope that she would have been able to put this behind her much sooner.\u201d\n

\nAmber Wyatt had used drugs before 2006, and, once the rumors spread, those with knowledge of Wyatt\u2019s drug use seemed to view her reputation as a reason to doubt her version of events. But Deborah Caddy, director of rape crisis and victim services at the Women\u2019s Center of Tarrant County, suggested a different kind of relationship between victimization and drug abuse.\n

\nStranger rapists \u2014 the kind of attackers who victimize people they don\u2019t know \u2014 hunt for victims who exude vulnerability, Caddy said. Acquaintance rapists exhibit similar behaviors, Caddy pointed out, scanning their social milieus for people who are in some way incapacitated, available for the taking: people whom nobody will believe, people who can\u2019t fight back. <\/a>You cover so much territory in this story. How conscious were you of rhythm and pacing as you structured and wrote?<\/span>Aspirationally, very. In practice, I tend to lag. I had to force myself to be cognizant of pacing in this piece, because we knew it was going to take a lot of space even to get the bare story down.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nIt\u2019s like hunting, in other words. The whole thing was something like a hunt, and Wyatt was easy prey <\/a>You use a source\u2019s expertise to set up a damning conclusion. Why take that approach?<\/span>In part because it was a point I hadn\u2019t thought about before, so it was just as revelatory to me as I assumed it would be to some readers.<\/span><\/span>\n\n



\n\nIn the crime-scene photographs taken inside the shed where Wyatt said she was assaulted, you can count the buck heads \u2014 12 mounted neatly on the first floor, another half dozen strewn on the ground of the loft, antlers tangled like bramble, eyes wide and staring. Wyatt\u2019s panties are there, too, on the concrete under the empty watch of the beheaded deer. How blunt it seems, overstated almost\u2014 prey among prey.\n

\nMany a treatise on brutality has taken deer as its subject, because the pleasure derived from killing them is so disturbing in light of their docile grace. Montaigne laments the dying cries of a wounded heart in his essay on cruelty<\/a>; so does William Wordsworth in his poem \u201cHart-Leap Well.<\/a>\u201d Both Montaigne and Wordsworth meditate on the deer\u2019s last stagger, the long prelude to death, the moment when the light leaves its eyes. <\/a>One doesn\u2019t expect to find Montaigne and Wordsworth appear in a contemporary article on a botched rape case Why did you use these classical figures in your description of Amber?<\/span>I just kept thinking of those eerie deer heads in the dark. I dreamed about them, actually. And I guess that led me to think about why I would respond to them that way, and of course that was something Wordsworth and Montaigne had each considered, so I brought them in almost like experts.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nWyatt had eyes like that: thick-lashed, wide and dark, dimmed to vacancy at times by drugs and alcohol. She was beautiful, and she was vulnerable. And everyone knew it.\n

\nIndeed, Wyatt\u2019s case remains a dark reminder that vulnerability to predation occurs on more than one axis. Wyatt was young. But she was also someone who struggled with drug and alcohol use, and someone her peers understood to be working-class. For the assault itself, and for everything that followed, she was easy to discount.\n

\nMontaigne and Wordsworth lived near enough to the bloody indifference of nature to spare a thought for its victims. But the veneer of civility painted over modern life has paradoxically revealed a certain contempt for victims and the condition of victimhood. And perhaps, lurking in all the complaints about our putative culture of victimhood, there is something uglier than generalized contempt: a disdain for the weak. <\/a>These philosophical passages are among the most unusual and powerful in the story. Why did you write them?<\/span>Laying down the story felt incomplete without them…I think by this late point in the piece, it became especially clear to me that we didn\u2019t just owe the readers a recitation of what really happened, but also an effort at understanding why and how, and that\u2019s where the philosophical passages come in.<\/span><\/span> <\/a>The cadence and pacing are spot-on. Did you read your story aloud?<\/span>I did, yeah, to my husband, after our toddler was in bed.<\/span><\/span>\n

\nIt\u2019s obvious that vulnerability will elicit viciousness from predators. But then there are the rest of us \u2014 the cast of Arlingtonians beginning with midnight partygoers and ending with high school rumor-listeners who, with honorable exception, ridiculed Wyatt at worst and ignored her at best. Wyatt\u2019s story calls on us to inquire: What motivates otherwise ordinary people to abandon all pretense of mercy when faced with the abject need for it? <\/a>Without attribution, you ask the reader to consider the moral implications of the rape case and its aftermath. Unusual for a case of reportage, no?<\/span> Unusual, yeah. Not unheard of. That move is one I have admired in other work I\u2019ve read, and it felt natural here, since we\u2019d already taken readers such a long way with us.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nTo look into the eyes of a vulnerable person is to see yourself as you might be. It\u2019s a more harrowing experience than one might readily admit. There is a version of yourself made powerless, status diminished, reliant upon the goodwill of others. One response is empathy: to shore up your reserves of charity and trust, in hopes that others will do the same. Another is denial: If you refuse to believe you could ever be in such a position \u2014 perhaps by blaming the frail for their frailty or ascribing their vulnerability to moral failure \u2014 then you never have to face such an uncomfortable episode of imagination. You come away disgusted with the weak, but content in the certainty you aren\u2019t among them.\n

\nOr they make you feel helpless, just by dint of how little you can do to stop what\u2019s being done to them. The temptation in that case is to look away, let it all be someone else\u2019s problem, or deny that there\u2019s a problem in need of resolution in the first place.\n

\nAs I reported on her story over the course of three years, Wyatt was alternately patient and frustrated. She wondered, in a series of private Facebook messages to me, whether this article would ever be published, and whether revisiting that period in her life was worth the emotional cost. It was, she told me last year, \u201ca wound that has been reopened.\u201d\n

\nSometimes I replied; sometimes I didn\u2019t. I didn\u2019t know whether the article would ever be published, either. But I didn\u2019t want to be the last person to look away. <\/a>Did you share Amber\u2019s concerns? What kept you going?<\/span>I had already put so much work into it, I couldn\u2019t just leave it; that was part of it. Another part of it was a sense of obligation to everyone I had recruited in that work \u2014 the interviewees, etc. And then I just knew what I had learned mattered, that it was important.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

PART FIVE<\/h3>\n

What you know now<\/em><\/h4>\nWyatt\u2019s drug habit worsened after she was moved from Martin to an alternative high school in Arlington. She was arrested in December 2006 for driving while intoxicated, which she pleaded guilty to in a county court, and again in 2009, on charges of possession of a controlled substance and possession of marijuana, to which she pleaded no contest. Her record states that she was arrested for a final time in 2010 on a charge of driving while intoxicated, this time in Denton, Tex. Again, she pleaded no contest. For a time, she lost her driver\u2019s license. Her 2010 mugshot, posted online by the Texas Department of Public Safety, shows her disheveled and on the verge of tears, bearing only a passing resemblance to the bright and outgoing cheerleader she had been only four years before.\n

\nLate in November of 2010, Wyatt overdosed on a cocktail of Klonopin, vodka, cocaine and methadone, bringing her to the brink of organ failure. On Dec. 1, Wyatt posted a despondent Facebook status: \u201cIn ICU for the past 2 days. I\u2019m having kidney failure. Please pray for me.\u201d Once she made it out of the hospital and into addiction treatment, Wyatt\u2019s counselors told her she needed to invest her trust in a higher power \u2014 to have faith.\n

\nWith all that had come before, that word in particular stung more than it soothed. And her past followed her. \u201cEven four years after I graduated,\u201d Wyatt told me in 2015, \u201cI would meet people and they would be like, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re Amber Wyatt.\u2019\u2009\u201d By which they meant, as Wyatt interpreted their response, the girl who \u201clied about being raped.\u201d\n

\nStill, the incidents of normal life returned in hard-won bits and pieces: a car, a home, a steady job. Last March, she married Stephen Wilson, a man she encountered in recovery. The two met on an outing to Six Flags Over Texas, an amusement park in Arlington, where they sat side by side on a Batman-themed roller coaster. They live quietly now in the Texas city of San Marcos with a dog named Stitch, <\/a>\u201cGet the name of the dog\u201d is shorthand for complete and detailed reporting. What do you think is the value of getting Stitch\u2019s name?<\/span>I asked about it initially. What people name their pets just strikes me as very revealing.<\/span><\/span>abandoned by Wilson\u2019s former roommate when he went back to using. Wyatt has taken Wilson\u2019s surname.\n

\nThe last time I see her, we meet on a warm Dallas evening in April. The city is wide and magisterial, with a crest of glittering lights marking its heights in the darkness. On a clear night with bright stars, the city and sky can lose their seam. <\/a>What a beautiful scene!<\/span>Thank you. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever be finished writing about Texas.<\/span><\/span> It\u2019s a night like that, and she rounds a corner in a quiet restaurant to see me waiting for her in a booth.\n

\nW<\/span>yatt is completing an undergraduate psychology program at Texas State University. This year, she\u2019s serving as a teaching assistant for a forensic psychology course; from there, she\u2019s considering pursuing a master\u2019s degree. I notice, as we sit in the restaurant, a peace sign tattooed on the underside of Wyatt\u2019s wrist. Has she found it, I wonder? Faith is still a tender word. But she trusts \u201cin a spiritual power,\u201d she tells me. \u201cI let myself believe.\u201d\n

\nIn the years since that ill-fated pool party, society has made important cultural and legal strides in treating victims of sexual harassment and assault with dignity and respect \u2014 much thanks to feminist-led movements such as #MeToo. Indeed, Wyatt\u2019s decision to cooperate with my reporting when it began in 2015 was an anticipatory #MeToo moment \u2014 she hoped, by speaking out publicly, by giving her name to a grimly familiar story, that she would help some other girl in some other city.\n

\nIt is tempting to imagine that, if all of this really had happened now, in the wake of #MeToo, things would have been different and justice better served. And some things have certainly changed. Over the past several years, attention paid to sexual assault cases outside the stranger-rape mold has increased thanks to a changing consciousness about the realities of coercion and consent. With stories like the 2012 Steubenville, Ohio, rape case and the 2012 prosecution of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, we have begun to understand how systems of power can warp the consciences of otherwise ordinary people when it comes to prosecuting or even reporting sexual assault.\n

\nLikewise, the #MeToo phenomenon has resulted in accountability for high-profile perpetrators of sexual abuse who were, sometimes for decades, protected by edifices composed of their own power, prestige and wealth. That figures such as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Steve Wynn have faced serious repercussions after accusations of sexual misconduct testifies to a real and growing revolt against sexual abuse at society\u2019s highest echelons. Still, progress is slower and abuse more frequent lower down the socioeconomic ladder, where poor and working-class people have relatively little recourse when it comes to suffering sexual misconduct, both because the costs of speaking out are often unbearable and because their abusers rarely grab headlines the way Hollywood rainmakers and politicians do. <\/a>You often climb up the ladder of abstraction from the detailed description of the rape and what followed to philosophical reflections. Were you aware that it\u2019s a departure from traditional reportage? Did you feel at this point that you were writing an opinion piece?<\/span>I knew that there were several ways we could have told this story. I guess now that I\u2019ve used \u2018we\u2019 several times, I should say by \u2018we\u2019 I mean me, my editors, the designers and videographer, Gillian Brockell, since all of us played a role in telling this story \u2014 and I knew one way would be just straight reporting: Here\u2019s something that happened. And I think we all knew pretty early on that wasn\u2019t going to be exactly how we did it.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nSo I look back uneasily, unconvinced that we have come such a long way after all. Because there will always be opportunities to do evil and evil opportunists. There will always be acts of cruelty prepackaged with plausible deniability, or the easy cover of crowds to disperse responsibility. There will always be people nobody believes: people with lesser reputations, people who struggle with addiction, people without much capital, social or otherwise, to credit them. And there will always be cases of offenses that are real and true but hard to prosecute, which means that justice in the world \u2014 if it\u2019s to exist at all \u2014 will have to take some other form than the formalized and official, and peace will have to arise from some other reckoning than a proper settling of accounts.\n

\nThis is my imperfect offering toward that end: a record of what happened, and the willingness to have been troubled by it all these years. It still troubles me now \u2014 it will always be unresolved \u2014 and I hope that it troubles you, because the moral conscience at ease accomplishes nothing. <\/a>For the first time you address the reader directly. Why?<\/span>In gratitude for making it all the way to the end with me, more or less. A nod of thanks.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nWyatt doesn\u2019t have much interest in pressing for a trial or other remedy after all this time. Even if she did, it would be impossible; Lucero\u2019s files indicate that all the physical evidence relating to Wyatt\u2019s case was destroyed \u2014 common with no-billed cases \u2014 in 2009. All that remains are the urban legends and the memories, the wounds and their scars, a stack of documents in a Texas public safety office, what you know now, and the hope that you will carry it with you into the world.\n\n

EPILOGUE<\/h3>\n

Hope and haunt<\/em><\/h4>\nThe day after her 29th birthday, which was also the day after this story first appeared online, Amber Wyatt, now Wilson, stood in the shower in her San Marcos home and sobbed \u2014 hard, wrenching, wrung-out tears. They had been a long time in coming.\n

\n\u201cI\u2019m trying to face my emotions, because the last time, I didn\u2019t. I numbed myself,\u201d Wyatt explained in a Thursday afternoon phone call. She sounded tired, and she was: She had just arisen from a midday nap \u2014 the good counsel of her husband, Stephen, who had come home to be with her after her breakdown in the shower.\n

\nThe publication\u2019s timing \u2014 not just on Wyatt\u2019s birthday, but in the midst of yet another convulsive national debate about the treatment, or mistreatment of women and girls, and how to reconcile conflicting stories \u2014 was one of those accidents of perfect cosmic coincidence.<\/a>When you began this project could you have imagined the #MeToo movement?<\/span>Not at all \u2014 that was just fortuitous, in terms of context for the piece.<\/span><\/span> But it found Wyatt as the unexpected, somewhat overwhelmed recipient of gifts \u2014 not in the form of material goods but in the shape of words and, more important, of emotions, of comfort, of respect, of regret. In short, the opposite of what had greeted her in the dark days \u2014 the dark years, really \u2014 after the party that August night a dozen years ago.\n

\nWyatt had quite a bit of giving to do, herself. There was, of course, the enormous effort of having shared herself \u2014 her story, her pain, her face, her name, all in the hopes that her act of self-giving could rescue someone in need. On her Facebook page, she set up a fundraiser for a Dallas-area rape crisis center; she asked her friends to donate to the group in lieu of presents for herself. The goal she set was $200, a fine amount. By Thursday night, a day and a half after this story was posted and curious readers found their way to her profile, Wyatt had raised $1,275.\n

\nThat felt good. But for all the old saw about it being better to give, the gifts that Wyatt received felt better, even more so for how long they were in coming. The influx of support was sudden and drastic, almost surreal. In the illuminated scroll of Wyatt\u2019s life, those old, cruel inscriptions \u2014 the spray-painted slurs on the school wall and the declarations of \u201cFAITH\u201d scrawled on cars \u2014 were superseded this week by new words: The hashtag #IBelieveAmberWyatt appeared on Twitter hours after the article went live, amplified by hundreds of messages echoing the same sentiment. I had shared the final version of the article with Wyatt a few days before it was published, and reading her story brought its own sense of satisfaction and closure, <\/a>There\u2019s still a view in some newsrooms that you never share a story with a source before publication. Why did you do so in this case?<\/span>On one hand, it was the decent thing to do, seeing as this story was in large part her story, and she had a right to be prepared for what was going to be said about it. I also wanted her to be able to prepare for any backlash \u2014 we didn\u2019t know how the public was going to respond to all the information here. Of course, people responded very positively. But I had no idea whether that was going to be the case ahead of time.<\/span><\/span> but neither of us had anticipated anything like this outpouring of support. If anything, she had been braced for more anger and ugliness.\n

\n\u201cIt\u2019s an amazing feeling,\u201d Wyatt told me. \u201cThere\u2019s a side of me that\u2019s so excited that everyone\u2019s opening up and listening. But there\u2019s still a 16-year-old girl inside of me who\u2019s just overwhelmed \u2026 It\u2019s overwhelming to go from nobody believing me at all, to how many people believe me now.\u201d\n

\nThe new believers weren\u2019t all strangers. Some voices came from the past, and that, it turned out, was the most powerful gift of all. \u201cI was at Martin at the time of Amber\u2019s rape and was a team captain on the football team,\u201d one former student wrote in a lengthy email to me. \u201cI also attended the party in the article. I wanted to share my thoughts on what I think I owe Amber. I owe her my regret of not doing more in the moment and after. While I did not participate in the after-effects of writing on the wall and FAITH, I didn\u2019t do anything to stop it, and I had a voice that might have been listened to.\u201d\n

\nOther Martin students and Arlington residents have contacted Wyatt to apologize for how they treated her back then, and to disavow their loyalties to those who hurt her. In the Martin High School Class of 2008 reunion Facebook group where she posted her story, several former students sounded similar notes of regret. \u201cAmber, I\u2019m not sure why I pretended to know what happened,\u201d one male classmate wrote, \u201cand then even how vastly incorrect my understanding of the situation was. … I\u2019m sorry we all thought 6 months of sports was more important than your livelihood.\u201d A female classmate added: \u201cI am so sorry we all failed you when you needed help.\u201d And another: \u201cI\u2019m disgusted by my own behavior at the time and I apologize.\u201d<\/a>Did the apologies surprise Amber? You? Of all the reactions to the story were these the most important?<\/span>Amber took everything very much in stride \u2014 I do think she felt overwhelmed at first. I was surprised that there wasn\u2019t more defensiveness from the kids who had been at Martin at the time; sort of the opposite, in fact. Maybe spending so much time focused on that period made me a little cynical. But people do grow and change.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nStill others shared accounts of their own assaults, including one email that arrived in my inbox the evening the article was published from a woman who had attended Martin not long before Wyatt. \u201cLike Amber I was a cheerleader and like Amber, I have a similar experience,\u201d she wrote. \u201cShe was brave enough to immediately come forward, but I was not. This happened to me and it happened to other girls I knew. We never talked about it after the parties. We just went on, I guess accepting what happened as a consequence of being intoxicated. Embarrassed to hear talk of it in school the following week, the best thing I felt I could do was minimize the experience. I didn\u2019t see it as a violation until much later in life.\u201d\n

\nShe concluded on a point both hopeful and haunting. \u201cI hope my children will have a very different experience than we did,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIt never leaves you after all.\u201d <\/a>How did you decide on this ending?<\/span>When I read that email, I thought that line was the one to end on. I wanted an ending that was hopeful, but also one that was honest. And I thought that line encapsulated that twilight pretty well.<\/span><\/span>\n\n

\n\nOriginally published Sept. 19, 2018.<\/em>\n

\nVideos by Gillian Brockell<\/a>. Video graphics by Danielle Kunitz<\/a>. Portraits by Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post. Header video photos by George Shiras\/National Geographic Creative. Police photos courtesy of Arlington (Tex.) Police Department. Copy editing by Lydia Rebac. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Design and development by Courtney Kan<\/a>.<\/em>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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