Underdog (5 page)

No matter. I considered it all part of the fallout that came with being an outspoken columnist. I was and am an outsider. I wear it like a badge of honour now, and understand through much experience that journalists must be outsiders to tell the truth and represent their readers. Insiders can't or choose not to tell the truth or they wouldn't be insiders for long. There's a place for insiders, to be sure, but not as investigative journalists – as CBC's Evan Solomon knows well. I'm not putting myself on a pedestal, god knows, partly because I never had a choice in the matter: I was born an outsider.

On a Tuesday morning in September 2004, three days shy of my forty-eighth birthday, I walked into the office of psychiatrist Karen Abrams. I told Dr. Abrams, who specializes in women's mental health and violence against women issues at Toronto General Hospital, I didn't want to turn fifty still being angry at the world. Finally, after twenty-five years, I was determined to change my life, no matter how painful it would be to strip away the anger and denial.

By the time I got to Dr. Abrams, I was weary and desperately unhappy. I was so depressed that my family doctor put me on anti-depressants to help me cope at work – something I would have never considered in all the years I pretended to be someone I was not. I was tired of living a lie; of denying that the assault of twenty-six years earlier had not deeply affected and traumatized me; of pretending I was tough and on top of the world; of numbly letting my life fly by in a blur while I balanced precariously on a treadmill I couldn't stop.
If I'd ever toyed with the idea of seeking help before, I'd been so busy trying to keep all the pieces of my life together and doing everything I possibly could not to be “outed” as a gay woman, I suppose I didn't have time to look for help. There was always the question of finding the proper fit with a helping professional. In my line of work I'd heard horror stories about psychiatrists, psychologists, and even social workers. As fragile as I felt inside, I was astute enough to know that if I were to reveal my innermost secrets to someone, there had to be a professional bond, a real trust, and an understanding of and insights into my vulnerabilities.

Within a few sessions, I knew I'd found the right person. Karen was Jewish, she had a sense of humour and a tremendous empathy, and never once did she stand in judgment. I liken her work with me almost to that of an emotional tour guide. She let me talk and helped steer me in the right direction. I often describe my role as an investigative journalist, in getting to the bottom of mismanagement and corruption with any organization, as similar to peeling away the layers of an onion. That applied to me during my discussions with Karen. For the first year, I cried almost non-stop in every single forty-five-minute session with her as I revealed my deeply held secrets and anxieties. Slowly but surely – always with her guidance – I started to piece together the patterns of my life and the anger was replaced with an understanding of how I interacted with everyone, both friends and family. My emotional tour guide saw me through a sexual assault trial, my coming out, my breakup with my ex after twenty years of living in the closet, my wedding to Denise, and finally, but only in recent years, my acknowledgment of the deep denial I'd felt around my first assault. I know it was up to me to do the hard
work, but I feel myself blessed to have had a therapeutic relationship with Karen.

The Sunday in August that led me to find Dr. Abrams began quite innocuously. Purchasing a storage bench from a store down the street from my condo, I offered the young salesman who served me an extra twenty-five dollars to assemble it after work. I thought nothing of inviting him into my condo because I lived only two doors down the hall from the lobby, which was manned with twenty-four-hour security. Besides, the store was a fixture in my Yorkville neighbourhood and I trusted the owners. I sensed something was wrong about twenty minutes into the young man's visit when he suggested he'd made a mistake putting the bench together. As I peered at what he indicated was the supposed problem, he grabbed me and began caressing my buttocks. I retreated, trembling and in silent horror, to my open-concept kitchen. When I next looked out at him, he had his penis out of his pants. Then, somewhat nervously, the words came tumbling out of him. He told me he'd felt a “vibe” from me and that he'd always had a fantasy about having sex with an older woman in a situation like the one in which he found himself. He asked if he could kiss me. When I told him absolutely not, he persisted. He was now standing in the middle of my living room with his penis fully erect. I would write in the victim impact statement I read in court nine months later that I felt this was not really happening to me. Numb, strangely calm, and fearing somewhere in the recesses of my mind that he would force himself on me, I tried to act as if nothing had happened. I eventually convinced him to zip up his pants and leave. I don't remember whether I paid him. I think I did. I do remember that a few
minutes seemed like hours. Considering he could have raped me, I escaped relatively unscathed – physically at least.

Twenty-six years earlier, I had not been so lucky. The first time I was assaulted occurred on a raw and still bitterly cold St. Patrick's Day while I was in my final few months of journalism studies at Carleton University. With a job in Toronto awaiting me when I graduated that May, I decided to sublet my bachelor apartment, putting an ad in the local newspaper. After I'd arranged with the man who answered my ad a time on St. Patrick's morning for him to see my apartment, I asked the superintendent to be there with me. He refused, even chiding me for asking him. I was not a priority, he told me. Convincing myself that nothing could ever happen during the light of day and feeling foolish for asking the superintendent to be there, I didn't want to bother my boyfriend at the time either. As I later learned, it ended up being the perfect time for an assault. Most people were away at work, and the two neighbours who were there and heard my screams chose not to get involved. One later told the police that she thought it was a baby crying. The other believed my cries to be over a domestic issue and she didn't want to get involved.

Within a few minutes of his arrival, I made it pretty clear I was alone and that no one would be coming to keep me company during his tour of my tiny bachelor apartment. When I turned my back on him for just a moment, he struck, bludgeoning me several times on the back of the head with a lead pipe he had hidden in a pocket of his khaki-green duffle coat. With blood from my wounds streaming down my face and into my eyes, I could think of nothing but fighting back. As he continued to hit me, I turned around and tried to knee
him in the balls while screaming at the top of my lungs for help. This only made him angrier and more desperate. To try to silence me, he pushed me to the ground, climbed on top of me, and squeezed his hands around my throat. At that point, all I could think of was how my family would take my death. With the blood roaring in my head and my own voice sounding like it was coming from within a deep tunnel, I finally and mercifully passed out. The Ottawa police later told me that was what saved me. Thinking he'd murdered me, my assailant fled. When I came to, I realized no one was coming to help. I don't know how I had the presence of mind, but I dragged myself to my front door and locked it.

Then I called my boyfriend, shrieking hysterically. His lovely grandmother kept me talking while my boyfriend hurried over to my apartment. When he saw me with blood pouring from my head, he panicked and called the fire department instead of the police and EMS.

Later, lying traumatized in the emergency ward of Ottawa General Hospital, I replayed the interchange with my assailant in my mind many times. He had given me clues, but I chose to ignore them. He kept one hand in his coat pocket as we spoke. He changed his story. At first he told me he was in a rush because he had to catch a bus to Arnprior, a forty-four-minute drive west of Ottawa. A few minutes later, just before he assaulted me, he said he was in a hurry to take a flight to Montreal. It took the doctors two dozen stitches to sew my head together. I was left with a dent at the top of my head and a scar above my eyebrow. I suffered a concussion, a blackened eye, and an inability to talk because of the abrasions to my neck and throat.

Upon my release from the hospital, far too traumatized to return to my apartment for fear he'd be back to finish me off, I spent the next few days at the home of my boyfriend's grandparents. The next morning, still reeling from the shock, I went to the police station, where I pored through books filled with various facial features to help the police artist compile a composite sketch. I wanted to ensure I did so before my memories began to fade. That composite would be distributed to every police vehicle and station in the city of Ottawa. The investigating officers told me that, from my description, my assailant easily had a hundred pounds on me. If caught, my attacker would be charged with attempted murder. But I was advised that a capture would most likely occur only if he attacked again. That wasn't what I wanted to hear.

I never returned to my apartment. After a few days back at home in Hamilton, where I recuperated from the beating, the emotional trauma hit me so hard I was afraid to return to Ottawa at all. I would only agree to go back to school and finish my degree if I could live somewhere where there was plenty of protection. My mother Judy flew up to Ottawa a week later, and with my boyfriend's help, I rented a room in the nurse's residence at another hospital. The residence had twenty-four-hour security, and that, at least, was a comfort. I finished my degree requirements, started my new job in Toronto a month later than originally planned, and graduated in November of that year. I suppose I also graduated from the school of hard knocks, so to speak.

When I returned to Ottawa to work in the job for newly elected Prime Minister Joe Clark's government a year later, I never followed up with the police to check on the status of
the case. Eleven years later, when I started my journalism career at the
Toronto Sun,
I quickly came to realize that the Ottawa police, considered not the most efficient or effective at their crime-solving abilities, probably didn't go out of their way to solve the crime or even conduct a proper investigation. That said, I could hardly point fingers since I, too, had put the attack behind me.

That was my first mistake. I wish I could say the trauma dissipated, but when anyone is attacked so violently and left for dead, life can never be the same without counselling, or at the very least deep and long introspection. As a result, I spent the next two decades in denial, quick to erupt in anger when I felt overwhelmed, treated unfairly, or when even the smallest things didn't go my way.

As the
Sun
's editor Lorrie Goldstein told me, the anger found its way into my writing. I'd never allowed myself the indulgence of looking within myself, preferring to engage in my drug of choice: workaholism. Already an obsessive-compulsive personality – meaning in my case that I needed to strive for perfection and fill every waking minute with activity – I was a perfect journalist, forever working long hours and going beyond the call of duty to get the story. The exclusive focus on work wreaked havoc on my personal life, keeping the spotlight off my closeted homosexuality.

In comparison to the first assault, the second attack was minor. But to my shock, it triggered memories of the first, resulting in a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Within days of the second assault, I fell apart emotionally and sank into a deep depression. For weeks afterward, I would wake up in the middle of the night, panicking and in a sweat. I came to call my Fridays off “Black Fridays” because, with less to
keep my mind preoccupied, I would spend much of the day crying. When I could see that, after the first week, the trauma wasn't subsiding, a kind counsellor at the Toronto Police Victim Services unit proposed I contact the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic – for women who have experienced violence – to make an appointment.

Unfortunately, I was told it would take at least a month for a spot to free up. I thought I could wait, but when my grandfather suddenly passed away, the combined stress and sadness proved insurmountable. A kind social worker friend of my ex, Ellie Levine, seeing that I was in chaos and knowing I didn't know where to turn, got me right in to see Dr. Abrams.

Over the weeks and months that followed, I was blessed to get support from the most unexpected places, in addition to that very generous social worker friend who hooked me up with Dr. Abrams. A few days after the second assault, and still in shock, I had coffee with the city's now retired auditor general, Jeff Griffiths. I tried to put on a brave face as I relayed to him what had happened. After all, my automatic go-to response – based on how I dealt with and was encouraged to deal with my first assault – was to try to make light of it and go on with my life. Mr. Griffiths was in the midst of a follow-up audit on the handling by Toronto police of sexual assault cases. His original review in 1999 had produced a scathing report with dozens of recommendations. After he heard what had transpired with the police response to my assault, he said it sounded to him like the cops had broken every rule of a protocol that had been put in place by then police chief Julian Fantino to ease reporting of such assaults and to ensure police investigators conducted regular and timely follow-up with victims. Mr. Griffiths would prove an invaluable friend
and a sounding board, regularly reminding me of what the police were obligated to do. He was the kind of auditor general who was dogged about keeping up the pressure on those bureaucrats he audited. Five and ten years after his initial 1999 review, Mr. Griffiths did in-depth follow-ups to see how far the police had gone to implement his recommendations. His ground-breaking report has been reviewed and used by police forces across North America.

But it was not just the support from unexpected places that helped my healing. What kept me from succumbing to my crippling depression was a determination to get my day in court – the kind of closure I was denied twenty-six years before with my first assault. I soon realized that getting justice would prove to be as much of an uphill battle as facing my demons with Dr. Abrams. Like so many other victims of assault, sexual and otherwise, my ordeal had merely begun with the assault itself. Over the next nine months, I would feel repeatedly betrayed by a system that is supposed to help victims – by jaded cops untrained in sexual assault cases, by a women's support network that appeared to pick and choose who it helped, and by an overstretched legal system that tried to strong-arm victims into dropping their cases. I was careful throughout never to talk about my first assault, except to Dr. Abrams and a very few close friends as a way of explaining why I'd fallen so completely apart. Despite my profile as a journalist, I was forever afraid that if the cops or court officials found out what had happened to me twenty-six years earlier in Ottawa, they would take me even less seriously than they did at the time. (I quickly discovered why more than 80 per cent of Canadian women who
suffer a sexual assault do not report it. Put simply, they are afraid of being victimized all over again by the police and the court system.)