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Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Joanna Connors: "Beyond Rape: A Survivor's Story" and "I Will Find You"

Joanna Connors is a winner of the 2008 Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism from Northwestern University, and Columbia University’s Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma for Beyond Rape: A Survivor's Story.” A reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, she wrote the series about her own 1984 rape, her struggles to survive the aftermath, and her resolution to track down her rapist 23 years later.   
At the time of her rape, she was a film critic for the Plain Dealer, having arrived in Cleveland from Minneapolis less than a year before. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, where she met her husband, Connors began her journalism career at theMinneapolis Star (now Minneapolis Star-Tribune). She and her husband both left theStar when it was bought out, and at the time of her rape, he was also working for the Plain Dealer, on the police beat.
What started out as a series for the newspaper is now a memoir that is a must read for every woman who has ever been raped, who has feared being raped, or who has never even thought about being raped. And for every man who wants to understand or who cares about the women in his life—mothers, sisters, wives, or daughters. Because it is more than a story of rape. It is a story about our divides—of race, of education and opportunity, of prison, and of family. 
Book Cover of I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
by Joanna Connors
Published by Atlantic Monthly Press 
April 5, 2016
272 pages
“This is it. My rape. I knew it was coming. Every woman knows. And now here it is. My turn.”
Not always easy to read, but essential reading all the same, Joanna Connors has applied her objective reporting skills to her own rape and its aftermath.
She was running late on the July afternoon in 1984 when she reached Eldred Hall at Case Western Reserve University, where she was scheduled to interview the cast members of a new play. There was only one man at the theater when she arrived, fifteen minutes late. Explaining that he worked on the lighting, he put out his cigarette and invited her into the theater. She did, ignoring that yellow warning signal until it was too late.
The man was a parolee, only a week out of prison, when he brutally raped her and ended the first half of her life. The thing about rape is that it changes you. It changes you in a hundred different ways, not all of which are obvious—even to yourself. Joanna Connors describes her out-of-body experience during the rape, after finding her own blood on her hand from a neck wound he had inflicted. She watched the rape occur from far above. And wondered when he would kill her. As he released her he warned her not to tell the police because if they found out, he would have to go to prison. If he did, when he got out, he told her, “I will find you.”
Remarkably, her rapist was caught the very next day on campus by a university security guard working undercover. Identification was made easier by the amateurish tattoo of the name, DAVE, that Joanna had reported seeing on his arm. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 30 to 75 years in prison by a disgusted judge.
As Joanna Connors describes the events, she shares her inner thoughts and fears. During a pretrial meeting, the prosecuting attorney asked her, “Why did you go into that theater?” She is unable to remember her response.
But when I decided to write about the rape, more than two decades later, Levenberg’s question remained unanswered.
[...]
I went into the theater for one reason: Because he was a young black man.
I could not allow myself to be the white woman who fears black men.
My decision came out of what James Baldwin called “that panic-stricken vacuum in which black and white, for the most part, meet in this country.”
She knows that three-quarters of rapes are committed by white assailants on white victims and almost the same percentage of black victims are assaulted by  blackperpetrators. Only 16.4 percent of rapes involve a black perpetrators and white victims. Even knowing that, after her rape she fears all men, but especially black men. 
The fears, the panic attacks, the thrumming heart— this new fear of black men shamed me more than the rape.
When Chris Rock said, “I was born a suspect. I can walk down any street in America and women will clutch their purses tighter, hold on to their Mace, lock their car doors,” he was talking about me. I hated that he was talking about me.
Her honesty and her clarity about her own motives and behaviors permeate this book. She applies the same clear vision as she tracks down the man who raped her so many years before.
David Francis died in prison, leaving Joanne Connors no choice but to pull all of the public records on her own case, as well as the records of her rapist’s past criminal convictions. Then she begins tracking down friends and relatives of Francis. A new editor at the Plain Dealer assigns her a photographer and editors to develop her search for answers into what became her award-winning series. This allowed her time to travel and chase down leads. She takes us with her on this quest for the monster she wants to understand as she travels to Boston, New Bedford, and back to Cleveland in search of answers. 
In 1975, Susan Brownmiller wrote the best-seller Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape that influenced many women of my generation, including Joanne Connors. I have always considered it to be the fundamental study of the societal impact of rape and it no doubt still is. I Will Find You belongs on the same bookshelf. With honesty, compassion, and a reporter’s objective eye, Connors has taken the reality of rape one step further. She has shown us not just the damage that it does to the victim, but how that damage extends to the entire family of the victim. She exposes the emotional trauma that can last for a lifetime. She makes it personal.  
In exploring the life of her assailant and learning from his sisters and others what their childhood was like and what they experienced, she reveals how a child born into abuse and nurtured by violence can be shaped into a monster.
And she does it so well that the book is compelling reading. You would think that a book about rape and its aftermath would be depressing and hard to get through (and parts of it are), but overall her writing is so pitch perfect and her storytelling so engrossing that I Will Find You is mesmerizing. I could not put this book down, and read it from the first page to the last in a single sitting. It may be early in the year, but it’s unlikely that another will come along to knock this book out of its place as my favorite book of 2016.

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