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NEWS
Violence That Won't Let Go
By BOB HERBERT, New York Times, 23 August 2001

I woke up and there was the outline of a man standing over me," said Wendy Reilly. "And then, as my brain started registering what was going on, I realized that the reason I woke up was because he was pulling a pillow case over my head."

Ms. Reilly, who lived alone, was attacked in the bedroom of her home in Kissimmee, Fla., in February 2000. It was one o'clock in the morning and the room was dark. The intruder held a switchblade knife to her head and threatened to kill her if she tried to look at him.
"Then he just raped me repeatedly," she said. "He stayed there for three and a half hours."
I interviewed Ms. Reilly by telephone last week. One of the many awful things about her story is that it is so ordinary. According to the Justice Department, a woman is raped somewhere in America every 90 seconds. Approximately 1.9 million women are subjected to physical assaults of one kind or another every year. That works out to an attack on a woman every 15 seconds.

Few things are more commonplace than the abuse of women. A Justice Department survey showed that more than half of all women - 52 percent - were assaulted at some point in their lives, either as a child or an adult.

Wendy Reilly is one of many women who have agreed to participate in an extensive new campaign by the Lifetime Television network to combat violence against women. She said she hoped that telling her story would help heighten awareness of the hideous reality of rape and other forms of violence against women.

Ms. Reilly was 38 when she was attacked. She said that after the three and a half nightmarish hours in her bedroom, the rapist forced her to drive to an A.T.M. machine, withdraw all her cash, give it to him and then return with him to her home. Then he raped her again.

"He was scaring me so much," Ms. Reilly said. "All I wanted was to escape from him alive. He wasn't right in the head. One minute he would freak out, grabbing my hair and slamming my face down in the bed. Then he'd act like he was playing out a fantasy, like I was his girlfriend and this was all totally normal or something. That terrified me even more because I could tell how unstable he was. I knew he was very capable of killing me."

Before leaving around six o'clock in the morning, the rapist asked Ms. Reilly for a date. She recalled him saying, "We're friends now. Let me take you out to dinner."
"That's how deranged he was," she said. "He thought that I would go out with him."
Ms. Reilly said she "couldn't think straight" when the man finally left. She felt numb, and couldn't understand why she wasn't crying hysterically. Eventually she fled the house and drove to her parents' home nearby. Her parents called the police.

The rape turned Ms. Reilly's life, in her words, "upside down and inside out." She lost her job. She fell into a deep depression. For a long time she was suicidal.
She resented the comments of some people who suggested she should have fought back against her attacker. "They talked about fighting and clawing. I said, `You just wait until they have a switchblade up against your head and you'll see how far you're going to claw.' Would it make everybody happy if I clawed his face and then he sliced my throat open?"

One of the purposes of the Lifetime campaign, which will include special online as well as on-air programming, is to show the devastating long-term effects of violence against women.
"I just wasn't the same person after that night," said Ms. Reilly. "It was like he came in and touched me with evil, and suddenly it was on me and it wouldn't come off.
"I had trouble making decisions. I couldn't sleep. I kept wanting to disfigure my face, slice it up with razor blades so no one would find me attractive and want to come and do this to me again."

Ms. Reilly said counseling and antidepressants have helped her. She is no longer suicidal. She is working and lives in a new house in a different town. She feels better, she said, but she does not feel "good." She is racked with rage and guilt. Anxiety accompanies her everywhere. She mows her lawn in leggings and big baggy shirts, afraid to draw attention from anyone. She still needs pills to sleep.

"Believe me," she said, "I don't feel safe anywhere at any time."