Rape Victim: George Will Is Just As Brainless Besides Being Tasteless!

A victim speaks out against a sexist bigot.

During an interview the woman who became the center of George Will's controversial column about rape victims speaks out against the conservative agitator's piece.

Lisa Sendrow a victim of a sexual assault on her college campus thought that Will's comments were "grotesque" and "downright stupid".

We here at Journal de la Reyna agree with Ms. Sendrow.

As you know, I've said it time after time!

Rape is not funny! It's not a badge of honor. It's not something to be made into a comedy or slut-shaming event. RAPE IS RAPE. IT'S A CRIME AND PEOPLE WHO COMMIT THIS ACT SHOULD BE PUNISHED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW!

People like Loudmouth Bill Cunningham, Rush "KING HIPPO" Limbaugh, and George Will are examples of this culture of men who believe that a rape victim "asked for it".

No matter how a woman acts in public, she shouldn't be subjected to any sexual assault. Many men believe that the woman "had it coming" because she was drunk or she wanted to be a "slut" anyway.

Will thinks that women who get drunk and want to sleep around deserve to be raped. That's what his controversial column talked about. It gin up so much controversy, it cost him a few syndicates who distribute his columns.

Media Matters for America interviews Lisa Sendrow and asked her how this column by Will affected her perspective of the rise in college campus rape.

George Will is a certified idiot. He's too blind or too damn stupid to understand that rape on college campuses is real and the victims are afraid to tell the law about the incident. He believes it's coveted that a woman gets raped. 

Sendrow graduated from Swarthmore in 2013 and now works as a legal assistant. She told Media Matters in an interview over the weekend that she first "tried to avoid the Will piece as much as possible," but after friends pressed her to read it she found the column "infuriating," and felt that his dismissal of her story was dangerous to survivors.

"No one wants to hear that you brought this on yourself," she said, while discussing her reaction to Will's piece. "No one wants to relive the experience or tell that story, when they haven't really had a chance to reflect. You can't really heal if people are telling you that it's your fault. But that's what Will did."

Sendrow explained that she has experienced sexual assault multiple times, but decided to officially report this particular experience and talk to Philadelphia magazine in part because at the time she worked as an advocate for survivors on a campus hotline. "I realized that I could no longer be an advocate and tell survivors to go to the college and report if I wasn't going myself." But the decision wasn't easy, and that contributed to her choosing to wait before initially reporting. "The fact that Will said I waited [to report the assault] -- most women wait awhile. You have to think about what happened, you have to heal."

Research from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control found that 1 in 5 women had been sexually assaulted while in college, and repeat victimization is common. Reporting rates are particularly low on campuses, and campus assailants tend to be repeat offenders. "This is the only sexual assault I've ever reported," Sendrow noted, "because I felt I was the most safe reporting this one."

She added that she "was also raised to think I put myself in this situation, and it took me a really long time. After hearing others' stories I realized it wasn't my fault -- I was raped. I didn't want to be diminished, I didn't want to be afraid."

While the Philadelphia magazine story clearly documented a serious example of sexual assault (notably, Sendrow specifically stated that she did not consent), Sendrow felt that the magazine took her story and others out of context and omitted key details, "which was exactly what we didn't want to happen." Her assault was "more violent than what [the Philadelphia magazine reporter] wrote. The way he made it seem was very small in comparison." Sendrow added that she received "very threatening" messages from her attacker days after the assault, which the Philadelphia story hadn't included. She had hoped that talking to the media would in part help other survivors by showing they no longer had to be afraid and that their stories couldn't be diminished, and was frustrated when that was "exactly what [Will's column] did."

Sendrow also vehemently rejected Will's claim that survivors might have a coveted status. "I absolutely have not received any privileges from sexual assault. [Will] has clearly never experienced the fear of sexual assault," she said. "He clearly has no idea how hard it is to sleep, to walk around, thinking at any moment this person that you live down the hall from could come out."

Rush Limbaugh and Bill Cunningham are two men who believe that it's the woman's fault for a rape.

She saw a counselor and was diagnosed with PTSD following the assault, she said, which "is pretty common for a lot of survivors I know. It did not help my grades, it did not help my social status. I lost a lot of friends ... No one tells you, 'oh you're a survivor, let me give you a free lunch.' No one gives a shit about you. What benefit could we possibly get? Sometimes I feel like I can't have a real relationship because someone might touch me in the wrong way. How is that okay?"

Sendrow told Media Matters she received violent threats after the Philadelphia article was published. One threat said that she and the other women quoted in the story "deserved to be stoned." Others said "I should be raped again, or 'really' raped, that I was a slut, you know, using my sexual background to say I deserved it."

For Sendrow, most upsetting about Will's column was that "he was politicizing sexual assault, he's a conservative columnist, but why should sexual assault be political?" She criticized him for putting the term sexual assault in quotation marks, implying doubt in survivors' stories, and for using her personal story to "describe the experience of all survivors, and [making] it seem very small." She added, "it was mostly upsetting because I don't feel like survivors' voices were heard."

Will's full column, Sendrow said, made it feel "as if women don't have a voice. Anything bad that happens to a woman, it doesn't matter, because we're the ones who are at fault. And this is already what we're told every single day," she concluded. "We're raised all our lives to think this isn't an issue. But this is an issue. This is why people are triggered, this is why people have PTSD. People will go through their lives thinking rape culture isn't real."

In the end, Sendrow wondered whether Will would have been able to similarly dismiss her story of assault if it came from someone close to him.

"What if [Will's] daughter -- I don't know if he has a daughter -- but would he say to her, that this didn't happen?" she asked. "If she came to him crying, or even not crying, but if she came to him and told him this story, would he just say it wasn't real?"