To those who keep claiming that women usually report their rapes, or get any sort of justice when they do. And this is the 2000s and the accused weren't celebrities or anything, and the evidence was iron-tight.
What do we owe her now?
By
Elizabeth Bruenig in Arlington, Tex.
Videos by
Gillian Brockell
Updated Sept. 21, 2018
Twelve years ago, Amber Wyatt reported her rape.
Few believed her. Her hometown turned against her. The authorities failed her.
PART ONE
About that night
Aug. 11, 2006, was a sweltering Friday night in the midst of a long, fatally hot summer. A 16-year-old girl reported that she was raped that night, in a storage shed off a dirt road in my hometown of Arlington, Tex. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it, and nobody was punished except, arguably, her: By the end of the fall semester, she had disappeared from our high school, leaving only sordid rumors and a nascent urban legend.
I never saw her, the rising junior-class cheerleader who said she had been assaulted by two senior boys after a party. I only heard about her. People whispered about her in classrooms and corridors as soon as school started that year. The tension in the school was so thick that the gossip about what had taken place trickled down even to the academic decathletes and debate nerds like me, the kids who could only speculate about what happened at the parties of athletic seniors. I was a 15-year-old rising sophomore, and even I formed a notion of what had happened, or what was said to have happened.
Leaving school one autumn day in 2006, I stood at the top of the concrete stairs at the back exit, with the senior parking lot spread out before me, cars gleaming in the still afternoon sun. Several of them bore a message scrawled in chalk-paint: FAITH. They looked to me like gravestones, brief and cryptic in neat rows.
The next day, people whispered about the word in the halls. It was an acronym, I learned, meaning “f--- Amber in the head,” or “f--- Amber in three holes,” which I awkwardly explained to my parents when they asked me one evening why so many cars around town were thus marked. The idea struck me as brutally, unspeakably ugly, and it was the ugliness that came to mind each time I saw some rear windshield dripping the word in streaky chalk at the local Jack in the Box or Sonic Drive-In. Eventually I heard the girl had recanted her allegations and then had gone away; the writing on the cars, too, went away, and the question of what had happened that night.
And then it was quiet, life was mundane, things resumed: Like an ancient society settling back to rights after a gladiatorial game or ritual sacrifice.
Yet despite the fortune of a happy life, I found it difficult, over the ensuing years, not to think about what had happened that August. I still remembered the taste of summer there, and the pregnant threat of storm clouds, among which flashes of lightning pulsed like veins of silver, and the sense that youth meant collecting inklings of things I couldn’t fully know. One of them was the impression I had gained that year, that vulnerability sometimes begets bloodlust and revulsion, even in seemingly ordinary people. Another was the sense that the damage that follows litters the underside of society, beneath the veneer of peace.
In April 2015, as a young writer, I was granted the rare opportunity to explore this notion. I was working at the New Republic magazine at the time, enjoying the warm auspices of an editor mostly content to let me pursue what I found most interesting. With his blessing, I reached out that spring to the girl whose name had appeared in acronyms and spray-painted slurs, and asked whether she was interested in talking to me about 2006.
Amber Wyatt at her home this summer in San Marcos, Tex. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post)
Her name was Amber Wyatt, and she was.
On and off over the next three years, I reviewed police documents, interviewed witnesses and experts, and made several pilgrimages home to Texas to try to understand what exactly happened to Wyatt — not just on that night, but in the days and months and years that followed. Making sense of her ordeal meant tracing a web of failures, lies, abdications and predations, at the center of which was a node of power that, though anonymous and dispersed, was nonetheless tilted firmly against a young, vulnerable girl. Journalists, activists and advocates began to uncover that very same imbalance of power from Hollywood to Capitol Hill in the final year of this reporting, in an explosion of reporting and analysis we’ve come to call the #MeToo Movement. But the rot was always there — even in smaller and less remarkable places, where power takes mundane, suburban shapes.
There were personal reasons, too, for my investigation. I wanted to understand why it had to be as bad as it was — why she wasn’t just doubted but hated, not simply mocked but exiled — and why it had always lingered on my conscience like an article of unfinished business, something I had meant to do but hadn’t. I wanted to look directly at the dark things that are revealed when episodes of brutality unfold and all pretense of civilization temporarily fades, and I wanted to understand them completely.
Otherwise, I thought, they could at any time pull me under. And I could watch mutely while something like this happened again.
East Texas is pine woods: subtropical growth, spindly trees rising out of green creeks as forest shades into bayou, the smell of drifting water. West Texas is arid, miles of prairie and stretches of red desert, with pale dunes rising just before you hit New Mexico. Arlington, population of roughly 367,000 in 2006, sits between Dallas to the east and Fort Worth to the west, suspended between Deep South and Wild West. Its current slogan is “The American Dream City,” and it’s true: a dream of anywhere in America, with suburban sprawl and yellow grass along the interstates and big-box stores.
That year, the “Friday Night Lights” television series premiered, putting the romance of Texas high school football in soft focus. There are towns in Texas where the whole city turns out for Friday night football games, but Arlington isn’t one of them, and James Martin High School wasn’t a football school.
Still, on the afternoon of Aug. 11, the Martin football crowd celebrated “War Party” — a kind of catered pep rally meant to kick off the football season before the start of school. For the kids, though, the main attraction was the after-party.
Wyatt was celebrating her inaugural year on the varsity cheerleading squad that evening. She performed routines at War Party, and around 9 p.m., arrived in her car at a 4,756-square-foot residence owned by the parents of another cheerleader. It was one of many fine homes within the gates of its upscale subdivision, with a spacious driveway out front and a lagoon-like swimming pool in back — a striking contrast to Wyatt’s far smaller home in an aging neighborhood across town. Even if no one spoke openly about the class distinctions among the cheerleaders, they were well understood.
That night Wyatt was buoyant, thrilled and on the young side for the night’s crowd, mostly juniors and seniors. She had a natural beauty, golden-skinned with long, dark hair. She had always been athletic and happiest on teams, playing soccer and participating in competitive cheerleading. She was wildly sociable, with A’s and B’s in school and an overwhelming urge to be liked. She was earthy and indelicate, not remotely shy; friends came easily, and she leaned on their approval. Arlington cheerleaders were, by many accounts, a hard-partying crowd, and Wyatt partied with the hardest of them, drinking with her friends and occasionally indulging in drugs such as Xanax and marijuana.
“I partied a lot. I’m not going to lie,” Wyatt recalled in a 2015 interview. “I was 16, I wanted to be that popular girl, I wanted everyone to like me, I wanted to be social, I wanted to know everyone. And I wanted to be one of the cool kids. . . . And I found that in partying.”
Music blared by the pool that night. Wyatt would recount to police later that her friend Trey gave her a water bottle full of lemonade and whiskey; and her friend Hannah shared a few gulps of her red wine; and her friend Erin shared her Smirnoff and her friend Kyle shared his beer. She was feeling good, light and free — her mom had given her permission to spend the night at the party house, which meant she didn’t have to worry about driving home in her condition. The party wore on, and since Wyatt hadn’t brought a bathing suit, friends playfully tossed her in the pool fully clothed. When she got in the front cab of a classmate’s truck sometime after 11, her clothes were still wet.
The two boys driving her didn’t seem to mind. Both were 17 and seniors — a well-to-do, stocky football player and an outgoing soccer player with wide, dark eyes and curly black hair. Wyatt had met them only in passing before; she recalls that they told her they were going to get food, then return. The three of them chatted and listened to rap while they drove, and by this point Wyatt was feeling drunk. They had their pick of fast-food joints; the house was practically flanked by a pair of Jack in the Box locations, and a Wendy’s and a Whataburger weren’t far off. They passed a Pizza Hut and a McDonald’s en route to what turned out to be their actual destination, a storage shed on the rear of a friend’s property.
The exterior of a shed in Arlington, Tex., where Amber Wyatt reported that she was raped, in a 2006 police evidence photo. The ladder to the shed’s loft area, in a 2006 police evidence photo. (Arlington (Tex.) Police Department)
Later, the soccer player would tell his friends that Wyatt had said she needed to urinate, so they had pulled over into the dark woods to let her relieve herself on the ground, at which point she had fallen and scraped her elbow.
Wyatt’s account is far darker. As she told police at the time, and recounted to me, the boys told her they wanted to pick up some more beer when they pulled up outside a friend’s shed, hidden off a back road in tangled trees and undergrowth. Crime-scene photos would later show that a pair of doors fixed with a slide bolt opened to a cavernously dark space filled with the odds and ends of family life — sacked-up Christmas decorations, stacks of old photos, spare furniture and a series of buck heads mounted on opposite walls. A wooden ladder led to a loft with dirty pillows and blankets piled on the plywood. Wyatt slipped and fell on her climb up to the loft — that part, she would always remember. The beer stash wasn’t there.
Once Wyatt reached the loft, she recalled, the football player instructed her to remove her clothes. She was incredulous at first, assuming it was a joke. “What did you say?” a detective asked her in an hour-long interview five days later. “No,” the 16-year-old answered with a scoff. When the boy persisted, she took a step in retreat, but tripped and fell backward, bloodying her elbow. Wyatt remembered saying “stop,” and then the same boy tugging off her “skort” (an athletic skirt-and-shorts combo used in cheerleading) and panties, moving over her and penetrating her. “I was just like, ‘Stop, please. Stop,’ ” Wyatt told the detective.
The boy on top of her rolled to his back, pulling Wyatt with him, though she struggled; it was then that the other boy approached. He forced his penis into her anus, Wyatt told the detective, while the other boy was still raping her vaginally. Moments passed like that, with Wyatt frozen in shock, staring into darkness. “My body was there,” Wyatt told me in 2015, but “my mind was . . . somewhere completely different. And I just remember praying a lot and not taking in my surroundings. It was more like, I want to get out of my surroundings and out of myself.” When she mustered the ability to fight back again, she said, she was able to push the boy behind her away, roll off the other and then scramble against a wall.
Wyatt couldn’t immediately recall, in her conversation with police, if either boy had ejaculated; all she knew was that the football player told her to perform oral sex on them afterward, saying they hadn’t finished. But she refused and snatched a few pieces of clothing from the floor, then managed to climb down unsteadily from the loft. She had hastily redressed in just her skort and top, because she was unable to locate her sports bra or panties. She fell again as she staggered back to the truck, but she made it, and the boys followed. There was darkness and silence on the ride back, and the glow of blue lights from the truck’s dashboard. Back at the house, Wyatt stumbled out of the same pickup she had left in less than an hour before.
There were a few partygoers still gathered in the driveway. Wyatt approached them immediately. According to her account and that of one of the classmates present, Wyatt told an adult and two classmates right then and there what happened. And she reported her rape to police the next day, when she underwent a sexual assault exam at the hospital. Police were at the shed taking crime-scene photos in less than 24 hours — so quickly, in fact, that Wyatt’s sports bra and panties were still damp on the floor.
