A nightmare that lasted nine years
02:49 PM EDT on Sunday, July 24, 2011
By Lynn Arditi
Journal Staff Writer
Pvt. Valerie J. Desautel swore under oath to an Army investigator that she would tell the truth about the night she was raped.
She was 20, a fresh-faced soldier from Rhode Island who was in training at Fort Lee, Va.
Desautel admitted to the investigator taking her statement that she’d been socializing the previous night at an officer’s club, got drunk, and accepted a ride from a man whom she’d only just met.
The officer sounded skeptical. You went with this man to a hotel, she remembers the officer saying, and you want me to believe that it wasn’t consensual?
Then, before the young private had time to think it through, she blurted out the words she’d been warned never to say in the military: “I’m gay…”
Eight weeks later, plagued by anxiety and flashbacks, she was ordered to pack her bags and was handed a plane ticket home. Her discharge sheet read: “homosexual admission.”
“Instead of rehabilitating me,” she said, “they threw me out like a piece of trash.”
read more here
A nightmare that lasted nine years
Monday, July 25, 2011
Female soldier raped, then tossed out for admitting she was gay?
We read a lot of stories about gay soldiers being kicked out of the military. We read a lot of stories about female soldiers being raped. This one combines both and it is pretty shocking to discover what happened to this woman after being raped and betrayed over "don't ask, don't tell." In her case, did the military try to tell her she shouldn't have talked about being raped too?
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