My friend Shara put it most eloquently when she pointed out to me something I couldn't articulate for myself. She said, "women are hardwired to hone in on safe spaces and safety."
And she and I have compared notes and we both agree that in our earlier lives before a certain thing happened to each of us that we both went through life feeling safe. We both thought we had it handled and that we were tough enough to stick up for ourselves. We probably weren't wrong for the most part.
But for me, on July 4th 2023, in Tahoe Keys, South Lake Tahoe, in the parking lot of the condos, the idea of feeling safe came into clearer focus for me.
On that night after the fireworks show had ended and I had dropped my friends off in the parking lot of their condo I was assaulted by a stranger.
How we ended up in contact with each other is relatively unimportant. Nonetheless, understanding that most people would like context, I will share some detail.
The parking lot where I dropped off our friends is very dark with no lights. It is one that I have been in and out of frequently to visit them and it is a small parking lot for the residents and their guests.
What I probably did not realize in the three or four minutes that I was parked in the space while they got out of the car and said their goodbyes, was that another vehicle had apparently come in and parked on the opposite side of the parking lot.
I had noticed when I pulled in that the opposite side of the parking lot was completely empty and therefore when I backed out very slowly I took more space than I normally would because I believed there were no cars behind me. At least until I heard a bump and realized I had bumped into a vehicle in a space opposite where I had been.
I pulled up quickly and put my car in park and watched to the back of my vehicle to see what had I had bumped into. It was a vehicle; a early '90s Toyota pickup with a tube bumper.
As I looked at it to see if there was damage to it or to my vehicle, the apparent owner and a woman accompanying him rushed back to where I was. I concluded they had been walking across the parking lot when I bumped into the vehicle.
He was very excited; almost agitated. I told him I had looked in the almost non-existent light of my taillights and it did not appear that there was much-- or any-- damage to his vehicle, nor did my vehicle seem to be damaged. As we stood there talking, the woman with him said--to him, not to me. "She's trying to leave the scene!" I responded with the obvious answer: "if I were trying to leave the scene would I be standing here talking to you?"
Even so he was in disbelief. He seemed to feel certain that there was damage to his vehicle and his voice was loud, almost yelling, and accusatory.
They asked for my driver's license and registration and insurance which I told them I would be happy to share. I told them I needed the same from him. He resisted, saying he had not been driving. I stressed that it didn't matter that he wasn't driving he still needed to give me the information.
After she accused me of trying to leave the scene, I started videoing secretly, but eventually, my phone died. They suddenly started accusing me of being intoxicated which was odd because it was out of the blue. It was just a mention but it was as if they were trying to cause me some sort of trouble that didn't currently exist.
Nonetheless I ignored their comments and pulled out my driver's license registration and my insurance card. I put the items on the hood of his truck so he could photograph them and again made the demand for his items. Ultimately I only got his registration and driver's license. He withheld the insurance information.
As we were concluding, he went around to the corner of his vehicle that he thought maybe damaged, the front right corner of his bumper, and started looking at it with the flashlight of his phone. I personally could not see any damage but also acknowledged that it was too dark to really see everything.
As I stood up from looking at the corner of his bumper, I turned to see the woman videoing the front of my vehicle. My headlights were still on, and my car was still running although in park.
I strode to the front of my vehicle and stood between her (and her phone), and my car. As I did so, she tried to push around me, and I put my hand up blocking her phone and pushed her phone and her away from me with my hand on her phone.
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| My assailant - Rene Harry Albert |
We were struggling. Most people who know me know this about me. I don't go looking for fights, but when somebody comes to me with a fight, I fight like a mongoose. You're going to get all claws and teeth and spit and blood.
He had me by my throat and he would not let me go. I was smacking his nose with the back of my head trying to give him a bloody nose; trying to get him to let go. I was scratching his face and biting his hand and his arm.
At one point he finally cried out, "stop biting me!" as if I were the assailant! I still remember that so clearly because that motherfucker was attacking me, and in spite of all of my fight he was still holding on to me and wouldn't let me go.
And he was telling me to stop biting him? By that point, I had a little bit of give, and I answered him. I said, "Let me fucking go!" (Yes, my vocabulary gets rougher as the fight gets worse. That's me. Sorry if you don't like it; take it or leave it).
I could hear at one point my phone--which was probably in one of my pockets or something--I heard it drop on the ground and slide away, and I was very concerned because I did not know how I was going to find it in the dark.
I kept biting and fighting and scratching and hitting and kicking and wrapping my leg around him trying to knock him over. Everything I ever learned about self-defense I brought to bear. He wasn't much bigger than me but he was male and he was stronger.
And then finally he let go. I don't know why. And don't know why he started the fight in the first place, and I don't know what he thought he was going to do with me.
The thing that neither he nor the woman knew is that my mother was in my passenger seat the whole time watching the entire thing happen. The windows were wide open. My driver's door was wide open. My mother heard and saw the whole thing.
As soon as I was free, I knew I needed to get in my car with the doors locked and get out of there before he changed his mind. But I needed my phone, and thank God, I found it in the dark. It had not gotten far. It was underneath my driver's door on the ground, and I grabbed it and jumped in.
My car was still running, and my first urge was to peel rubber out of the parking lot. And I looked up and there were at least six or seven people standing on the street, watching what had taken place. Watching me being assaulted. At least two were videoing what happened. But none has stepped in to try to defend me.
These were people walking back from the fireworks display that we had just come from earlier. And in that moment of realization that they felt more interested in videoing and watching without assisting... I suddenly realized that somehow a man assaulting a woman didn't seem wrong to them.
And I'm not sure which things scared me more; the attack I had just undergone or the realization that these people in some way felt I might have deserved it.
All the way back to my cabin which was about 15 minutes away I kept looking behind me thinking that somehow I was going to get stopped by the police. Somehow, I felt suddenly as if I, the victim of the assault, was going to be instead framed for something.
And in a bit, I will explain a little bit more about why I felt so afraid of the police department and distrustful of what might happen. There's definitely enough history there to support those feelings and fears.
Arriving at my cabin with my mom, I started to try to take stock of how I physically felt. My body hurt all over. My torso felt achy but I couldn't specifically say where or why. I knew that the adrenaline that had been dumped into my system in that fight to save my own life was still coursing through me and I probably was not going to be able to identify what hurt until the following morning.
My mom sat down and wrote out in her own handwriting a statement of what she had seen and what transpired and signed and dated it.
My sister who was also staying for the long weekend that weekend but had been out with other friends that evening, arrived home at the same time, and was absolutely beside herself with anger and frustration that somebody would do that to me. She wanted me to call the police right away.
I promised her I would call them but that I felt overwhelmed and in pain and I wanted to go to bed. In that moment the smart thing would have been to call them because I had been assaulted, and yet I just felt so distrustful of the police.
Perhaps it was because it started with me bumping into his truck. I couldn't see any damage on either vehicle, and if there are even were damage, it would have been minor. Moreover, it was on personal property and the police would never have been interested in even taking a report.
Somehow, I felt as though the law enforcement people would turn it around and make it my fault. In the morning, I woke up and could hardly move. Something was very wrong with my back. I had the beginnings of bruises all over my torso and my arms and legs.
I had been planning to go home to Auburn this morning anyway, so I started packing and getting ready to leave and thought to myself that I would make the call to the police department once I got home to Auburn.
By the time I got everything loaded into my car and drove home I was in excruciating pain. Something was very, very, very wrong with my back. I dropped my mother off and unloaded the car and lay down on the couch and did not get up for almost 2 days other than to let the dogs out or use the bathroom.
I did shower when I got home and as I stepped out of the shower, I saw my body in the mirror and realized that I was bruised all over from the assault. I documented the bruising with photographs. Some of them were so hard to photograph simply because I almost couldn't move.
And in that day or two that I took to try to recover from the pain in my back and the other bruising and other things I realized that there was something else. Something I am not sure I ever experienced before.
I felt afraid to set foot outside my door. I felt afraid to leave my house. I just felt afraid. I felt afraid that he would come to my house and assault me. After all he had all kinds of information about me. I felt afraid that the local police department was going to come pounding on my door demanding me to explain... What? I don't know. But those were my fears.
And as much as anybody reading this would say "That's just irrational. Why would you feel as though you were at fault? Why would you feel as though you were to blame? Why would you be afraid and why would you think that the law enforcement people would feel that you were to blame or pursue you or persecute you?"
I have an answer that is a completely different story from a completely different time in my life but nonetheless equally traumatizing. And rather than pull from that story deeply in this moment I will just leave you with this. I have previously been persecuted for something someone else did.
Law enforcement very often tends to label women as "hysterical," and "reactionary," and to dismiss real assault and harm, instead believing the men in the situation, who they identify with and who to them sounds more "levelheaded" or "rational." I have been the victim of this, on more than one occasion.
I notice that, in those rare instances when I try to explain to people that this is not an uncommon experience, I start to feel as though the person I am speaking to is looking at me as though I am trying to convince them that I was abducted by aliens. As though I am a bit crazy. I think that's the false lull of desired security that most people cling to in this day and age. I get it.
But, just as many people of color do not feel as though they have the luxury of assuming they will get equal treatment by law enforcement, so, too, have I been dragged to that point. Believe me when I say it was with a great deal of resistance. I am a former LEO wife. Before that, many, many people I knew (and still know) are or were law enforcement personnel. And trying to reconcile my experience with the fact of all those people who are my friends and family... well, that is a tough pill to swallow. [If you'd like to read more about my personal observation about abuse of power in law enforcement, read my blog entry entitled "Alice's Pirate."]
I have experienced what it feels like to be forced to surrender to law enforcement and spend the night in jail and have to hire an attorney to defend myself against false charges. Charges that should have been someone else's but that person had law enforcement eating out of the palm of their hand.
Compounding the effects of those very old memories was the fact that at that time of this assault, I was going through a very ugly divorce with a retired law enforcement officer. My ex had already, approximately three times in the preceding year, attempted to file complaints or charges against me for things that were made up.
And while he did not succeed, every time he made that attempt, I was thrown back into the same panic that I experienced when, long ago, I was accused by somebody of something I never did.
Thus, in these days following the assault of July 4th, 2023, I was once again thrown back into this panic, which I now understand was a version of post-traumatic stress disorder that made me believe that I would be blamed for all of what happened on the night of the Fourth of July.
And then the phone call came. I think I was expecting it. Why I was expecting it I don't know. Because who in their right mind assaults a woman and then calls and complains that she bumped his car in a parking lot and did no damage but they want to report it anyway?
But that is exactly what my assailant did. He called the South Lake Tahoe Police department and he reported that I bumped his car. And on my phone was a message from a South Lake Tahoe police officer asking to speak with me. This was approximately 2 days after the assault.
And I did not hear the message or even realize that it came in initially. When I finally checked my messages about four or five days after the original assault, I heard the message from the officer and realized it was important that I call him back.
Before I made the phone call back to the officer I confided in at least four other friends about the situation. I was in a great deal of fear. I can't honestly say what I feared. I just know that when men and women call the police and complain about each other in a mutually directed complaint it seems that the police always side with the man.
It's a misogynistic holdover. It is a lingering brotherhood of stonewalling and protection regardless of what the truth is. That is my experience of it. Even the courts still favor men. Here in Placer County, it seems rampant.
And those statements I just made? Those are things I believe when I'm not feeling traumatized. Those are things I know at the core of my being. I am not making those statements out of fear; those are facts that I have observed in action.
Compound the truth-- my truth that those things are real--with the reality that I was experiencing which was PTSD in that moment and perhaps you can understand why I was fearful.
When I finally called the South Lake Tahoe Police department and asked to speak to the officer that had called me, I was tempted to record the call. I did not feel safe or willing to trust that I would be treated appropriately even by dispatch.
And when I called, I was told that the officer was not working at that moment. I was told that he had no voicemail, and I could not leave him a message. I was told that they would not take a message and I could not leave a message for them to give him. I was told that there was no way to let him know that I had called and that I would just have to call back when he was working.
As I've mentioned above, I was a law enforcement wife. Not only that, I've also worked closely with law enforcement in a variety of different capacities in my careers in life and never ever have I seen any department have absolutely no mechanism to leave a message for an officer. It felt almost dishonest. How could a South Lake Tahoe police officer possibly conduct any kind of investigation if the people that he might need to contact or communicate with could not even reach him?
I continued to try to reach out to the officer until I finally reached him weeks later. He was truly disinterested in the entire conversation. When I finally expressed to him that besides the issue of the bump between the car and his truck that there was the issue of an assault, The officer again literally sniffed at me and dismissed it and told me that the"RP" --the reporting party meaning my assailant--claimed I had assaulted him.
I told him that the RP and his girlfriend had no idea that my mom had been sitting in the car and witnessed the whole thing and that she had written a statement regarding what she saw and what took place. I told him I had photographs documenting my injuries that were visible.
He told me to email them to him. I explained that I had been emailing him for weeks, to let him know I was trying to reach him. He again scoffed, as if I were just lying to cover my ass or something. I did not tell him that I was recording this--and nearly every conversation with the SLTPD-- at this point. I was being treated as though I were an absolute idiot, or an imbecile.
I do not know that I ever got confirmation that he got any of that information. The abuse by the South Lake Tahoe police department (by ignoring a clearly stated, well-documented, complaint of assault) is simply an entirely new version of trauma, compounding the trauma of the assault.
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