Hanover
State Sen. Martha Hennessey, D-Hanover, posted on her Facebook page last week that she was assaulted by a Dartmouth College classmate at a fraternity party in 1976.
A member of the first fully coed class at Dartmouth, Hennessey said on Monday she was not sexually assaulted, but believes the attack was “gender related,” as about a dozen other students stood by and watched it happen.
“I was essentially beaten up and thrown to the floor,” Hennessey said.
“I didn’t press charges, but word spread around campus — all false — about what occurred. Friends I had known my whole life quickly blamed me for the incident,” she said in her post.
Hennessey said her parents and boyfriend wanted her to report the assault to police, but she just wanted it to go away.
“This incident has lived with me for 42 years. My assaulter went on to become a physician,” she said. “I let him get away with it, because I was PROTECTING MYSELF.”
Hennessey said she came forward after President Donald Trump tweeted that the woman accusing Kavanaugh of a long-ago assault should have reported it at the time.
“It is NOT POSSIBLE for anyone to know what they would have done in my shoes or in the shoes of Christine Blasey Ford,” she said. “YOU HAVE NO IDEA. BOYS and MEN get away with it every day, everywhere. Victims are ridiculed, shamed, denied, and traumatized over and over again. Forever. DON’T ASSUME YOU KNOW.”
Hennessey’s late father, John Hennessey, was the dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business at the time, and she said he later confronted her attacker and told him “he would never receive a Dartmouth diploma if he did it again.”
“This occurred in the early days of co-education at Dartmouth,” she told WMUR-TV, which first reported her post. “I was in the first class of co-education, and there were only 180 of us. And the message was loud and clear that you do not rock the boat.”
Hennessey said she and U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster, D-N.H., who in 2016 said she was assaulted at a Dartmouth fraternity more than 40 years ago when she was a student there, had discussed their experiences together.
Hennessey said she raised the matter in part to illustrate how difficult it can be for women who are victims of assault to raise the matter publicly at the time, or later. Hennessey, a psychologist, said she also thinks the two women who have raised sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh are telling the truth.
“People don’t make this stuff up,” Hennessey said. “It’s extremely painful to come forward. … You are retraumatized again.”
The second allegation emerged against Kavanaugh on Sunday, just a few hours after negotiators had reached an agreement to hold a public hearing for Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford, who accuses him of sexually assaulting her at a party when they were teenagers. Kavanaugh denies both accusations.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.