It took several days for Amy McCall to report her sexual assault to the police. It took 11 years for her to speak about it in public.
That happened Thursday night, when the Manchester resident and activist opened up about her experience in a Facebook post — hours after searing testimony by Christine Blasey Ford captivated the country and furthered a national dialogue around sexual assault.
Her voice wavering, Ford told the world that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had tried to rape her in their senior year of high school, and how the alleged incident terrified her at 15 and haunts her at 52. Kavanaugh himself strongly denied the claims.
Watching the testimony on television, McCall started reliving her own experience. And she took it as a sign to show solidarity with her own account.
“She was doing it for us,” McCall said Friday as she joined a dozen or so picketers in the waiting room area outside of Gov. Chris Sununu’s office, urging him to take a stronger stand against Kavanaugh’s nomination. “And that’s why I’m starting to share my story.”
In 2007, McCall says, she was at a house party in Miami at 20 years old. She was there with a male friend; everyone was drinking. She doesn’t know how she got up in the room in the back of the house, undressed from the bottom down. But a man was on top of her, inside her, and her male friend was standing and watching.
“This (girl) is going to call ‘rape,’ ” she recalled the man said to her friend, referring to McCall with an expletive. Her friend laughed.
“Well I didn’t see anything,” he replied.
Two more men proceeded to rape her, she said, including the person she had counted as a friend. Confused, inebriated, and coming in and out of consciousness, McCall attempted to fight back, but wasn’t successful. She woke, horrified, with her clothes to the side of the bed; she dressed, grabbed her keys and drove to a friend’s house.
McCall told three close friends about the incident soon afterward, but she took time deciding whether to go to the police. Eventually she did.
Kicking off the interview with her, a male officer asked her what she was wearing at the time, she said. A female officer scolded her for drinking so heavily.
Months later, the police had made no follow-ups, she said. Needing a change, McCall quit her job and moved to New Hampshire.
“After everything I felt — the disgust; the humiliation; and the feeling of being dirty, used — to then be told, ‘This was your own fault if anything happened, you caused it,’ and they didn’t do anything with it,” she said.
It was too much to bear.
At Friday’s protest outside the governor’s office, McCall was hardly the only sexual assault survivor there. Some identified themselves with signs.
For the women in the room, most of whom had opposed Kavanaugh from the start, Ford’s testimony had struck a chord. Some said her words – which senators and even President Trump called compelling – could usher in a culture change in the treatment of sexual assault allegations.
“I was really impressed by her personal courage,” said Louise Spencer, founding organizer of the Kent Street Coalition and a survivor herself. “I think this is a very good chance that this is a turning point.”
But others cautioned that the road to progress is still as long as ever.
“The proof will be in the pudding,” said Elizabeth Lamy-Harris, of Henniker, who said she has herself been sexually assaulted but has never reported it. “Until I see a change in the way that people feel about a woman stepping forward like this, and at least examining what she said, without pushing her aside, or — in the case of situations I have witnessed firsthand — it being a joke … We all need to see this change.”
For McCall, those challenges are well-known. She nearly didn’t report her own incident. Days after it happened, she could barely admit to herself what she’d gone through.
“I remember just thinking in my head, ‘No, It’s not rape. That didn’t happen. Nothing happened,’ ” she said.
“To say ‘rape’ tells someone else — tells the world — that someone else violated me,” she added. “…And it’s humiliating and degrading. And it attacks every level of who I am as a person. And I didn’t want to say it.”
Nancy Glynn, a Manchester-based advocate with Granite State Progress, said that, for women in New Hampshire, where small towns foster close contact and familiarity, coming forward can be easier said than done.
As coverage of the Kavanaugh allegations have spilled into daily conversations, Glynn said many of her female friends have confided their own experiences in the past. But few are willing to come out publicly.
Many still see their high school abusers in the supermarket, Glynn said. To them, the risks are too high.
“They’re holding back just because they’re terrified of retaliation of an abuser that they have had in their past that they have not confronted at one point,” she said.
Still, to McCall, the national profile of Ford’s testimony has the power to comfort survivors, even if they choose not to report.
“It’s like you’re not alone in this,” McCall said. “And those feelings that you have, that typical fear, everywhere you go, it’s other people feeling it, too.”
She paused.
“I’m not crazy, I’m not a liar, I’m not imagining things. Because there are other people that are sharing it, and you’re connected. So it does help.”