00:00There's an image from Daisy Coleman's story that I can't get out of my head.
00:03Just 14 years old, laying passed out on her front lawn, her hair frozen to the ground,
00:09left there by the popular football player, who she says raped her.
00:13It is the high school he said, she said that rocked a small town about a night of partying,
00:18drinking, and sex that made national headlines.
00:22When Daisy pressed charges, overnight she became the lying slut of her small town.
00:26She was relentlessly bullied at school and online.
00:31It got so bad that Daisy attempted suicide multiple times.
00:35I'm Amanda Knox.
00:36A lot of people wouldn't put Daisy and me in the same boat.
00:39What could a defendant and a plaintiff have in common?
00:43Well, both of us were let down by the justice system.
00:46Both of us were disbelieved and blamed.
00:53What do you think people don't know about you?
01:00I think people don't understand who I really was before all of this happened to me.
01:06I was almost like a stereotype.
01:08I had blonde hair.
01:08I was a cheerleader.
01:10I was on the dance team.
01:11I did pageants.
01:13I was such a sheltered child at the time.
01:16I was a good kid, just to put it that way.
01:18Then after everything happened, all they saw of me was me running away from school
01:23or me running away from the problem
01:24or lashing back at people that were lashing towards me.
01:28Daisy's life changed forever on a cold night in January 2012.
01:32She had snuck out to meet up with Matthew Barnett,
01:34a high school senior from a politically connected family.
01:37Early the next morning, Daisy's mom found her unconscious,
01:41barely clothed, and frostbitten in their front yard.
01:44I just remember waking up in my yard and being sore.
01:47I was inebriated whenever the assault happened,
01:50so I don't even remember the assault.
01:53The hospital records showed Daisy sustained injuries consistent with rape,
01:57and Barnett admitted on camera to having sex with her.
02:00So you had sex with your rapaz?
02:03Did she ever say she didn't want to have sex with you?
02:06The felony sexual assault charge was dropped due to insufficient evidence.
02:11That's when the harassment started.
02:13One instant, some kid jumped out of his classroom when I was walking to the bathroom
02:18and called me a slut, and then I ran to the bathroom and called my mom
02:22and told her to take me home right now.
02:24You said that the ostracism and abuse that you suffered after your sexual assault
02:33was almost worse than the assault itself.
02:35I find that people use social media as a dehumanized way to speak to other people
02:42because they aren't seeing your reaction on your face
02:45whenever they're saying these terrible things to you.
02:47From Maryville to coverage across the country,
02:50a girl's accusations of sexual assault made headlines
02:53when she said she was harassed after speaking out.
02:56There was very little action being taken whenever people were doing things in front of my face,
03:01and then when it was done on social media,
03:03the school was like, well, it's off of school grounds.
03:06We can't do anything.
03:06I wash my hands of this.
03:08Yes.
03:10The abuse got so bad that Daisy and her family were forced to move,
03:13and she even tried to commit suicide.
03:16The most trauma did come from so many people telling me all these things
03:19and then me believing I was those things because so many people were telling me that.
03:23And you lose a part of yourself because you're trying to rekindle with what you believe you are,
03:28but then everyone is telling you something exactly opposite,
03:31so it just completely misconstrues how you look at yourself.
03:35Yeah.
03:35Barnett later pled guilty to the lesser charge of child endangerment.
03:39He received no jail time.
03:41Yes, sir, 19-year-old Matthew Barnett told a judge,
03:44pleading guilty to one count of child endangerment,
03:47the conditions of his probation, no alcohol,
03:49and an apology and restitution to the family to cover counseling costs.
03:53I have to really sit and wonder if he actually is genuinely sorry,
03:58or if he did learn anything from this,
04:00or if he just is sitting out there somewhere thinking that things like this are still okay.
04:05I think one of the scarier parts of these kinds of stories is that a lot of sexual predators
04:15don't even realize that they're sexual predators.
04:19They're not, you know, jumping out of bushes in the middle of the night and chloroforming someone and raping them.
04:26They're texting.
04:27They're plying with drugs and alcohol, and they think that that's all part of the game.
04:34The fact that, like, people don't believe that they're assailants whenever they're doing that kind of stuff
04:40is just a part of the culture, because that's what they were raised around,
04:43and that's the environment that they were in where they think that things like that are okay.
04:47Mm-hmm.
04:50It's so depressing.
04:51I know.
04:53I mean, you're smiling about it, and you can smile about it.
05:00That's what's incredible, though.
05:01Like, how did you get to that point?
05:04There is a long point of sadness, and, you know, that was a part of me forgiving myself for what
05:10happened that night,
05:11is realizing that I didn't control this other guy's actions, that he only had control over his actions.
05:17It wasn't my fault, and since it's not my fault and it's not a hundred other people's fault that they
05:22were assaulted,
05:23that, you know, if no one else is going to speak about it, then I need to.
05:30After my assault had happened, I definitely felt, like, very, very alone in the beginning.
05:36When I got so tired of being told to shut up all the time by someone,
05:40I was just always being told just to quit talking about it.
05:43And so, you know, that's when I decided to speak out about it, and then other survivors started coming forward
05:49to me,
05:49and I realized this isn't just happening to me.
05:51This is happening to hundreds and hundreds of people, even men,
05:55and that we need to, like, do something about this and actually talk about it for once.
05:59That's why Daisy co-founded SafeBay, a nonprofit that educates students about consent, acquaintance rape, and online bullying.
06:07I made an acronym for students so they can understand what consent exactly is, and that is MOVES.
06:13Consent is mutual, ongoing, verbal, enthusiastic, and sober.
06:17The culture that we're raised in, even in Disney movies, men are always portrayed as the go-getter,
06:23and, you know, you never take a no for an answer.
06:26In Sleeping Beauty, he kisses the princess without her consent when she's asleep.
06:30And so we grow up thinking that's a romanticized thing, but it's not.
06:34That's a soul.
06:35I like that you have Veni Vici.
06:38Yeah.
06:39You came and you conquered.
06:41What did you conquer?
06:42I conquered people that were, and I conquered my own mind, I feel like.
06:47So I think tattooing was a huge healing process for me,
06:51because I was trusting another person with my body and giving them consent to do something with my body.
06:57So I'm not going to lie.
06:59I'm really excited that you're going to tattoo me.
07:02And I really wanted to do the semicolon, but can you explain what that symbolizes and what it's all about?
07:12So the semicolon project was originally started by Amy Bluel.
07:16In a sentence, a semicolon is a pause.
07:19It's not an end.
07:20It's just a pause.
07:21And so what the semicolon represents is that your story isn't over yet.
07:25It's just paused for the moment.
07:27Are you ready?
07:28Oh, I'm excited.
07:30Hearing a story like Daisy's, it's easy to see how reporting a rape can so easily backfire.
07:38People wanted to protect Matthew Barnett, so they ruined her life instead.
07:46Hers is just an example of something that happens all the time.
07:57The injustice here isn't that Barnett was afforded the legal presumption of innocence.
08:02The injustice is that Daisy, like so many sexual assault survivors, was punished just for coming forward.
08:09Talking about consent, allying yourself with victims and with people who have made mistakes and have learned from them and
08:21repented from them, that is a powerful movement.
08:27How did it feel?
08:29How did it feel?
08:29It didn't hurt at all.
08:31Actually, it was great.
08:32As ugly as losing one's innocence can be, you can grow into a really beautiful person out of it.
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