CNN contributor Kirsten Powers described how she was sexually assaulted by older boys at her high school that got her drunk at a party when she was 15.
In an op-ed for USA Today where she is also as a columnist, Powers wrote that she didn’t tell anybody about the incident because, at the time, people didn’t possess the vocabulary to properly describe it.
“I told no one,” Powers wrote. “I don’t know what month it was. I don’t know whose house it was. I remember one of my two best friends being there but she doesn’t remember it.”
“While I knew something terrible had happened, I didn’t think I had been sexually assaulted,” she continued. “In the early 1980s, we didn’t possess the vocabulary to make such declarations. I thought I had done something stupid and paid a price for it. I thought it was my fault.”
Powers — who did not name her attacker — said that after passing out drunk on a bed, she awoke to see an older boy on top of her and her top was off. And while he denied anything untoward at the time, Powers later heard her attacker had bragged about “molesting” her in the boys’ locker room.
“My face burned with shame,” she wrote. “I feared that if more people in my small Jesuit high school found out about it, I would be viewed as a ‘slut’ or ‘damaged goods.’”
Powers’ column comes as the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court faces increasing peril after the FBI launched an investigation into multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against the judge. All stem from his years in the early 1980s in high school or college and say that his actions occurred while drunk. One woman, Julie Swetnick accused him and friend Mark Judge in a sworn statement of participating in “gang rape” parties.
Kavanaugh has categorically denied any and all wrongdoing.