Sailor Andrea Staggs agreed to have a few drinks with her Navy shipmates ina San Diego hotel in August 1994. The 20-year-old even agreed to go to a room and have sex with one of them.
But she said she never agreed to what followed: sex with a second sailor who grabbed her in the darkness. That sailor raped her, she said.
So Staggs turned to Navy officials, believing they would do something.
And they did.
They locked her in a mental ward for a week. They charged her with adultery, fraternization and underage drinking. They fined her $800 and labeled her "unsuitable for the Navy." The Navy finally discharged her from the service.
The Navy punished the man she accused, but not for rape. He was discharged from the service and fined for having oral sex with Staggs and several other unrelated offenses.
Women who report sexual assaults in the military frequently are branded as liars, forced to take polygraph tests, ordered to undergo counseling, dismissed from the military and even charged with crimes, the Dayton Daily News has found.
The practice is shunned by civilian prosecutors and law enforcement officers, who said the public would be outraged if they prosecuted women who came to them to report sexual assauts.
"I've heard 10 stories like this," said Wendy Davis, a Denver trial attorney and founder of Women Active in our Nation's Defense, a support group for military women who are victims of sexual assault.
"It's the 'nuts and sluts' defense. . . . They get sent over to mental health to get evaluated by the shrink. . .. Not only do they get no action, they get drummed out of the military," Davis said.
Order outranks justice
What happened to Staggs was partly the result of a tradition that dates back to the earliest days of the republic. The military has its own criminal justice system and that system is as much concerned with maintaining discipline as with enforcing justice, military historians say.
"If . . . she's saying, 'I've been raped by this soldier, but I've got to tell you that I've used drugs,' man, we'll jump on it in a minute," Gene Cromartie said in describing what happens when military investigators uncover information that demeans a rape victim.
Cromartie, who retired as head of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, added: "We'll still investigate the rape aspect of that, (but) she'llhave to be held accountable for her actions, because what she's done is in violation of our system - the military system."
Not all military investigators agree with the practice. Some are especiallyreluctant to file criminal charges against women who report sexual assaults.
"I can tell you there is a lot of hemming and hawing about doing that," said a veteran military investigator who asked not to be identified. "But our regulations are pretty specific."
Veteran civilian prosecutors don't see a point in charging victims.
"I don't know of any cases where you go back and prosecute the prosecution witness," said Memphis attorney Hickman Ewing Jr., who served as a federal prosecutor for 19 years.
Debra Armanini, first assistant Montgomery County prosecutor, said it's important for victims to feel they can honestly say what happened to them without threat of prosecution.
"We're not going to prosecute them based on their admission," said Armanini, who has prosecuted rape cases in Ohio for 10 years. "We're going to prosecute the greater crime - the rape."
"No one asks to be raped," she said. "The last thing they need is someone punishing them. They've probably already punished themselves over and over again in their minds."
In civilian life, an attempt to bring charges against a rape victim would be likely greeted with outrage, Armanini said.
But then, nearly every facet of the civilian justice system is open to public scrutiny, and many of the people overseeing it are either elected or work for someone who's elected.
In contrast, much of the military's criminal justice system operates behindclosed doors, and the public has no role in choosing those who run it.
Even when the military does open its courtrooms, few people attend the hearings and the records often are kept confidential.
Victims get the blame
At one Army base, five of 37 people reporting sexual assaults were charged or threatened with charges. Three were civilians, including a 17-year-old highschool girl who reported she was raped by a soldier.
The Dayton Daily News was granted access to information in the base's investigative files on the condition it not disclose the source of the information or the name of the base.
One of the five alleged victims the Army pursued charges against was a 22-year-old Dayton-area woman who in 1992 reported she was raped after returning to her barracks from a night of bar-hopping.
Instead of giving support, the woman said, the Army charged her with underage drinking, something she admitted to while reporting the alleged rape.
"She did a good job of intimidating me and trying to get me to say that maybe I wasn't raped," the woman said of the military investigator who took her report. "She kept asking me if I was sure I was raped."
The woman was disciplined with two weeks of extra duty and fined a half-month's pay, records show. The Army dropped its rape investigation after a military doctor reported he could not find enough evidence to show she was raped.
Investigators at the base tried to charge another alleged rape victim - an officer's wife - because the woman admitted to cheating on her husband before being attacked by a soldier in 1991. The attempt was dropped, a case file shows, when investigators realized that civilians cannot be charged with the military crime of adultery.
The charge frequently used against women who report sexual assaults in the military is lying, or "false swearing."
Among the hundreds of pages of investigative files the newspaper reviewed at the Army base was a document officially notifying the 17-year-old high school girl that she faced a federal charge of false swearing related to her rape allegation.
The girl told investigators that in 1990, an Army soldier drove her behind a building on a military base and raped her.
"They told me if I didn't pass the lie detector test, they would press charges against me," she told a newspaper reporter. "They made me feel like the scum of the Earth. I was the victim, and they made me feel like I was the one who was guilty."
The result of the test was termed inconclusive. She was not charged, and neither was the soldier she accused.
At a Navy station in Japan, a female sailor who reported being raped was charged with lying, sodomy and having "visitors" in her room. She was tried in1992, pleaded guilty as charged and was sentenced to 90 days in jail.
The woman got a more severe punishment than one tenth of all Navy sailors and Marines convicted of sexual assault since 1988.
The military strikes back
If the military suspects a woman is lying about something as serious as a sexual assault, it could judge her unfit for military service.
"It was the quickest way to end your career: To make such a report," said Susan Angell of the Department of Veterans Affairs, who helped the department start a counseling program in California for female veterans who had been assaulted during their service.
"When they try to make a report, they are ostracized, and their military career is in jeopardy," said Angell, who has worked with at least 50 assault victims - most of them military women - in her 18 years as a family therapist.
In reporting her rape, Andrea Staggs admitted she was drinking and consented to sex with a superior officer who was married. By making the report, she admitted to violating military rules on fraternization, underage drinking and adultery. The Navy said she had a "personality disorder" and dismissed her from the service in August.
But Staggs believes the reason she was discharged was because she didn't keep quiet. "I called the media, and they decided then and there that they wanted me out because I was making the Navy look bad," she said.
Jeff Ruch has heard it all before. He represents women like Staggs who filecomplaints through the Government Accountability Project in Washington, D.C., a private non-profit group that helps whistle-blowers.
"It's our general experience that people who report any kind of misconduct mark themselves for some type of retaliation," Ruch said.
All in the family
Prosecutions and firings are enough to discourage most people from reporting sexual assaults. But in the military, alleged victims have other reasons to keep quiet.
One is a lack of privacy. In the military, the rape victim, rapist, police,prosecutor, rape counselor, judge, jury and jailor may all work at the same base.
"If you got a rape exam in a military hospital, there may be people there who know you," said Connie Best, an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina's Crime Victim Research and Treatment Center.
"That fear is sometimes a barrier for women to report."
In 1990, after Pamela Sue Varner accused a Navy officer of sexual assault in Washington state, Varner walked into the courtroom and recognized two members of the jury. Both had asked her for dates before.
In the mind of the jury, Varner said, "I was the little whore who slept with him. . .. He got off scot-free.
". . . Reporting it was the worst thing I ever did in my life. All his witnesses belittled me and called me names. He (the accused) was second in my chain of command. It was like an office assistant accusing a CEO. I didn't stand a chance."
When service members come to Master Sgt. Andrew Pierce at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to report sexual assaults, he lets them know how private their complaints will be.
"If you present anything to me that would affect order and discipline, or admit any misconduct, I would have to inform the commander," said Pierce, a base ombudsman for family matters.
In 1992, Lt. Darlene Simmons, a prosecutor in the Navy Reserve, was put in a psychiatric ward after reporting that a supervisor had asked for sex while they were aboard a ship. By the time she got out, she said, everyone seemed toknow.
"Upon my release, I was horrified to find that word of my hospitalization had been spread all over the ward room and on the base," Simmons testified last year before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee. "It was far worse than the hospitalization itself."
In 1992, during a remote assignment on a Micronesian island east of the Philippines, former Air Force staff sergeant and medical technician Laura Webster reported that her colleagues were smuggling native women into the camp, getting them pregnant and contracting venereal diseases.
Webster and her 12 male team members were taken to Guam, where an investigation was launched. The men wanted to know why they were being investigated. Webster said that a supervisor showed them a letter that outlined her complaints.
For the six weeks the group was in Guam, the men harassed her at every turn, she said. In one instance, she said, they shouted at her from a balcony next to her apartment, telling her to "put a choke chain on her neck."
"Gossip was heavy, and I didn't want to be the spotlight of the base gossip," she said. "It's just like a mind rape."
Webster quit about a year later, saying the harassment left her feeling betrayed by the military.
A breach of trust
The effects of sexual assault are so traumatic that the pain usually lingers for a lifetime. But experts said the impact on military victims can beworse, because they feel betrayed by the system they thought would protect them.
After the Air Force did nothing to Lt. Col. Gary Carter for sexually assaulting her in 1989, Kelly Ann Peters said she developed bulimia. She was as mad at the military as she was at her attacker.
"I was losing it," she said. "I was throwing up all the time. . . . I hatedthe military so much. Every time a guy would come near me, I'd cry."
Carter was later charged with improperly touching 12 women at another base,but the Air Force still didn't prosecute him. He was allowed to resign and avoid trial.
For one of those women, a New Jersey Air Force sergeant, it was the second time she had been assaulted by a military officer. In 1984, an Air Force majorwas convicted of sexually assaulting her when she was two months pregnant.
When the military doesn't prosecute people like Carter, she said, victims blame themselves.
"You're always going to look at yourself and say, 'Did I provoke this person?' " she said. "You never have the answer to that."
Carla Kirkpatrick still marks the anniversary an Air Force doctor sexually assaulted her - March 20, 1985.
Air Force investigators waited weeks before interviewing Kirkpatrick, the wife of an Army sergeant, and only after her husband complained. After hours of interrogation and a polygraph test, the investigators got her to recant herclaim of abuse.
"They told me I failed the test, and it was all a figment of my imagination. . .and that a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force would never, never do such a thing. He's a doctor. He's there to help people," Kirkpatrick said. "They said I had made it all up and wanted attention."
Kirkpatrick said: "I signed a statement recanting, because I wanted to leave the room. By that time I was just sobbing."
The Air Force dropped the case.
After leaving the service, the physician, Dr. Kenneth Ake, raped five patients while in private practice from 1987 to 1990. He was convicted in a civilian court, but not before he admitted he also assaulted Kirkpatrick.
Nearly a decade later the pain was too much for Kirkpatrick.
"After nine years of living with it, I had a breakdown. I'll be on medication for the rest of my life for depression," she said.
If women like Kirkpatrick and Peters try to sue their attackers in civil court for pain and suffering they've endured, they'd get a greater shock.
Unlike civilian victims of sexual assault, military victims cannot get direct compensation through the courts. Even if a victim proves in a civilian court of law that she was treated unfairly by her employer - the military - she's unlikely to win.
The so-called Feres Doctrine, taking its name from a 1950 court case, makesit nearly impossible for members of the military to sue the armed forces for injuries caused during or as a result of military service.
Though the doctrine was originally intended for use in negligence or wrongful-death cases, it has since been broadened to provide immunity for the military and its employees in cases of sexual assault and harassment.
The rationale is twofold: First, the military maintains discipline through its chain of command and this discipline should not be undermined by the rulings of civilian judges. Second, military employees are expected to solve problems within the military, not through outside help.
In 1985, the family of a female soldier tried to challenge that immunity.
The Army soldier committed suicide after her drill sergeant allegedly ordered her into a latrine and then demanded sex while fondling her breasts and genital area. The lawsuit, filed against the sergeant and the military, claimed the victim killed herself as a direct consequence of the attack.
But a trial court dismissed the case, citing the Feres Doctrine and the overriding importance of preserving military discipline.
Editor's note
All the women identified in this series as sexual assault victims agreed tothe use of their names and, in some cases, photographs. Where victims did not agree to this, their names were withheld to protect their privacy.
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