Pagan Kennedy
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And as it began, it spread to New York and it started to go nationally and they would always get quotes from her. And she's very much interested.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
the person if you were a reporter who knew what was going on and would give you a good salty quote you know about what was happening but also she was very much kind of had her hands in every piece of it from the funding to working with the hospitals and working with rape crisis centers and all of that you know part of what you're setting up here and laying out in this book
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Yes, absolutely. You know, this was very much on my mind. I'm really interested in the politics of invention and design. I worked for a couple of years as what I called the who made that guy at the New York Times Magazine. And my job was every week to tell the backstory of an ordinary object. So I was... spent so much time hunting down the people who had actually originated ideas.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And what I learned from that was that the people who are at the forefront of the problem are often the ones who are best fit to solve it. So, you know, rock climbers invent really good rock climbing gear. People who with, you know, low vision are really good at inventing things that are audio-based. A lot of our audio technology came from people who had vision problems. It makes sense.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Things like that, yeah. And I've always been obsessed with the wheelchair ramp because... It's an invention. It's an idea that obviously makes buildings accessible to many more people. But it's also when you see, if you're able-bodied and you see a wheelchair ramp, it sends a message about who matters and who doesn't.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
You know, who matters, who's allowed to be in the building, who should be in the building, who's important. And I think that, you know, design and the designs, the stuff all around us is always sending us those messages about who's important, who should matter, who could matter. And unfortunately, too often, I think they send the wrong messages.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
But I was really interested in the rape kit because... As a system, as an evidence collection method, it's really brilliant, but it also sends a signal that we can solve sexual assault cases, that there can be evidence, that it's not all just a he said, she said. And if you're not able to get the evidence, maybe you're just not working hard enough.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
It's really, really similar. It still looks a lot like that. But as I investigated and talked to people, I became a lot more aware of the problems that do need to be solved and the fact that, you know, this kit was designed in the 70s in a completely analog era when people were, you know, talking on rotary phones and DNA identification and the Internet didn't exist.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
So I would love to see survivors and nurses and lawyers and technologists and everybody coming together to really talk about how we could make the kit now much more resilient, what we could do with all these new tools we have. There's so much evidence now that's digital. Like, how could that be brought together with the biological evidence?
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Well, that actually did begin with the backlogs because in 2018, when I fell down this rabbit hole, the rape kit backlog was very much in the news. There were, of course, almost half a million kits that hadn't been processed, and this had become a major scandal. And I suddenly, you know, I'd been hearing about the kit my whole adult life, I think.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
The interesting thing about the rape kit, as we talked about before, it's often sort of just not looked at. You know, and I just, if there's one thing I can do, I want readers to think about it and look at it and wonder how it could be better.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Sure. So Marty Goddard, in her various interviews, talks about how she... went around to the usual sources of money, which would be, you know, the fancy funding groups where people meet up in golf clubs, I suppose, or country clubs. And, you know, it's all very well-heeled. And, you know, back then, you did not say the word rape in polite society.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And so none of those groups wanted anything to do with this. So she really had trouble finding a funder. And there was a woman she had met when she was volunteering at the hotline named Margaret Standish, who's now Margaret Pokorny. And Margaret was working for the Playboy Foundation then, and so offered up the idea that you should try to apply, see whether Hugh Hefner's foundation will fund you.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Because oddly enough, Hefner was funding, he was very much about sexual liberation and even women's empowerment. And in the end, that's where she got her first funding from.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Exactly. I mean, I think, you know, but to his credit, he was funding a lot of women's rights groups and pushing for women's health initiatives. But yes, it did very much fit into his soft core porn empire to enable women to be, you know, sexually liberated and out there as swinging singles.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Yeah, so it was, you know, by the end of the 70s, the... There was a wide swath of hospitals that were offering these rape kits with the forensic exam. And then Marty Goddard began going to New York and helping the police department in New York to set up their own program. And then later in the 80s, this is where I think she really began to burn out in a lot of ways.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
She was traveling all around the country and Guiding people in best practices about how to set up really good evidence systems. So she was just all over the place. And I think that was sort of the beginning of the end for her.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Yeah, actually, it was Cynthia Gary who was, you know, Marty's collaborator in the early days who made me think about that first. And Cynthia pointed out that the whole point of this project was to have a survivor experience. You know, stand up and tell her story, but be backed up in a courtroom and be believed.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And she would be backed up by a person, a nurse or doctor in a white lab coat and a kit with seals on it that looked super official. And so there was a kind of theater element to showing the jury that you had collected evidence. Evidence could be semen or blood or pictures of the wounds. And you'd done it very, very carefully.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And just like everybody else, I was very aware of it. And I think like everybody else or lots of other people, I couldn't really, I didn't know much about it. And the more I thought about it, the more kind of amazing it seemed to me because there are just so many things in this world that that seemed to be designed to allow sexual assault to happen.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And it couldn't be faked because there was so much suspicion that the survivor would be lying. So it was very much about that, about sort of, you know, at a time when juries would be very oriented against an accuser, showing that there was a whole group of experts who were behind her.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Yeah. So there were limited things you could do. You could look at somebody's blood type. Obviously, that would rule out some people, but it wouldn't be very precise at all. There was sometimes some particular protein or something particular to one person that you might be able to really narrow down the field in terms of looking at semen or blood.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
But a lot of it would be looking at the survivor's body of what bruises did she have and her clothes. They were collecting whatever they could off of her body that might connect it to a scene of the crime. And they were pretty much flying blind, but trying to work with what they had
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
She was, from day one, she was very clear that part of the point of this was to clear the names of men who were falsely accused. And in the 80s, when she was sort of beginning to leave the stage, that was something she was outspoken about. But I would say that this is something that I feel people aren't aware enough of, that one of the things that's really important
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
You know, more and more parts of the internet, unfortunately, but just so many things, or date rape drugs, or some of the way cars work and things like that. But I couldn't really think of a lot of things that had been designed or created to back up the story of a survivor and to actually prove that an assault had happened. And so I really wondered, how did this come to be?
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
about building and protecting a rape kit evidence system is the fact that so many exonerations can come from this system. And I even found an interesting report recently showing that possibly the reason why false accusations against black and brown men has plummeted recently is because of the use of rape kits, and especially because we've now processed so many of the backlogged kits.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And so the point was made that, you know, even before the trial, if you have the DNA, if somebody is falsely accused, you can just overturn that very quickly if you have strong evidence or DNA evidence showing that Somebody else's DNA in the kit. So this is not even relevant, you know. So that's really important.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Yes. Well, I will say that thanks to wonderful groups like Joyful Heart that did the End the Backlog project and many survivors and prosecutors like Kim Worthy and all kinds of people who worked tirelessly to raise this issue of the backlogs back. That problem, it's not solved, but it's a lot better.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Through the last 10 or so years, there's been enormous funding to pay for the DNA in the kits to be processed, and it has really given us a lot of new data. So that's wonderful. I think there's, from the people I talk to and doing a lot of research here,
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
It's also really clear that we have a problem of access, that there are still just too few people who have been through something terrible who feel like they can submit evidence. So I think that's something we really need to think about and work on.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
We became aware of, yes, exactly, of that backlog in Detroit in the 2010s because of amazing activists in that city who brought this to attention. And there were Thousands of these kits that were warehoused in this structure that if you saw the video of them finding it and it looks like a parking garage and there was like pigeons flying around and stuff.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
But what's really depressing is that almost as soon as the rape kit system existed, the there were backlogs. Or I should say, as soon as DNA identification became possible, there were backlogs because it was expensive to do especially in the early 1990s, if you think about how expensive that would be. And so almost immediately, it was in the news. I found the news stories.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
But it wasn't really on anybody's radar that immediately there were backlogged kits and untested kits. And people who were very upset about that, you know, often people who were detectives or worked in crime labs were trying to raise this issue, but it just didn't get any traction, I think, until Kim Worthy and other people in Detroit really made it an issue. Prosecutor Kim Worthy. Yes.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And that sent me to Wikipedia, where at that time it said that Louis Vitullo was the inventor of this kit. But he had died. He was already dead and had been dead for a while. And as I kind of searched around a little more, I kept seeing the name Marty Goddard as somebody who had been involved or helped him or something.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Yes. So when I went back to write the book, I really was wrestling with whether I should talk about what had happened to me. And, you know, I was just in two separate incidents when I was a child. I was molested and I struggled with that because I felt like what happened to me was like the normal amount of sexual assault. I mean, it was like what it wasn't extraordinary.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And there's so many survivors involved. who have been through so much worse. And I didn't even think of myself as a survivor, really. It just, you know, it seemed to me like I was, you know, I didn't deserve that label. But as I thought more about it, as I was telling the story, I kept realizing that as I'm telling the story of Marty Goddard's Marching into the police department or whatever.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
I'm a little kid at that time and I'm grappling with what has happened to me and unable to tell the adults because it's a time when it's very clear you can't tell, you shouldn't tell because what happened, even if the adults are trying their best, they're not going to be able to hear it.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
So I thought that I would weave in my own story just a bit to just be another thread that really gets across what that time was like. And what's amazing looking back is I realize I don't think I really knew that sexual assault was a crime until I got to college in the 1980s. And we were all talking about it then.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And so I think my experience stands in for the experience of so many other people who something happens to you when you're very young and you think it's all your fault. But then as an adult, you find out, oh, this was a crime and that person was a criminal in the eyes of the law. And that actually, I feel like that's so important. I mean, it's such a small thing to ask for, but it's so important.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
I think one reason it's important is her story tells us a lot about how change can be made in difficult times, right? And, you know, she is a real case for getting into the weeds. I mean, she diagnosed the problem, specifically in Chicago, but the problem of sexual assault evidence, why it was being thrown out and so forth. She got in, she talked to everybody.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
She had this curiosity and she was just very oriented towards what exactly is the problem and how can we fix it? And I think she was working at this level of,
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
as a designer and a creator that is very inspiring to me and I hope to other people because, you know, often if you just simply dig in and kind of get in the weeds and figure out what a problem is and solve it quietly, you can actually make quite a significant change for the good.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And so I originally became really interested in her because I just thought, well, it looks like she's still alive. I can't find an obituary. So I really need to speak to her because I want to hear if she's the one living person who can tell me that story. I want to hear it.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Yes. So I originally found out about this because in my search for her, I turned up two very long oral history interviews where she was telling her story. And she always began her – she began her story – in a hotline for what they called runaway teenagers back in the 1970s. And she was volunteering at this place called Metro Help in Chicago, answering the phones.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And as she answered the phones, I mean, the story kind of going then was kids were running away because they wanted to be hippies and they wanted excitement and adventure and all that.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Right. And that was so the way people thought of it then. But as she heard the stories of these kids, they were running away from abuse. And then she would try to help them and find out they had been put in a juvenile hall or something where they would then be vulnerable to further sexual assault. So she was very, very upset about that issue.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And it's interesting because in the early 70s, people didn't distinguish the way we do now in the same way between we think of child sexual abuse and adult sexual abuse. We kind of put them in, make them separate, but it was much more connected in people's minds then. And so she was just generally looking at, okay, if what I'm seeing is correct, I'm seeing this hidden epidemic
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
of what she would call incest, of generally fathers or uncles abusing kids. There must be so many perpetrators out there. Why are we not catching them? What is going wrong? So that's what opened up the question for her.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Yes, exactly. Well, first of all, marital rape was legal in all 50 states in the early 1970s. And, you know, it's so bizarre because I was a little kid back then, so I lived through this period. But as I looked through newspaper articles and videos and all sorts of archival material, I was just shocked again and again at how...
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And the way sexual assault was talked about and the victim blaming, that was just crazy. I mean, I found a New York Times article from the early 70s, and the title was Little Ladies of the Night. And the reporter talked about the problem of these women. teenage, I mean, young, 12, 13, 14-year-old quote-unquote prostitutes in midtown Manhattan and how these children were the problem.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
It's exactly like that. And that character in Taxi Driver, she's treated like You know, she's this canny, wise adult almost. And these are kids. And there's no sort of thought of, well, how did these kids get there? What happened? Who's profiting off of them? You know, all the questions we'd ask now. And policing then...
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Another shocking thing was I found quotes from a police handbook in Chicago in the early 70s. And the instructions to police for when somebody accuses assault were that many women who accuse men of assault are lying. They're just trying to get revenge on a cheating boyfriend. So you don't really have to pay attention.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And it was completely up to the discretion of the police officer or the people in the hospital whether they even listened to the accuser. So if somebody is, say, is a sex worker or just is disheveled or whatever, for whatever reason, they could just completely write them off.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
So, yeah, in the early 70s, she began interviewing. She was put on a rape task force. There was finally a recognition that there was a real problem in Chicago. So she was on the Citizens Committee in this rape task force. And that gave her entree to talk to anybody she wanted to talk to, as she tells it. So she went into the crime lab. She... interviewed everybody there. She went to hospitals.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
She talked to administrators, nurses, everybody. And what she was trying to do was get so deep in the weeds that she understood the problem of evidence either not being collected or thrown out. So why were police or hospital workers not bothering to listen to somebody who accused rape?
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
But then this other problem that she noticed was that the people in the crime lab would just, they'd get the bag from the hospital after the victim was examined, and then they'd just throw it in the trash. Why were they doing that? Well, she found out that According to the people in the crime lab, the hospital workers didn't know what they were doing.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
And they collected the slides and the swabs the wrong way. And in their haste to treat the person who'd been attacked, they might rip open their clothes to help them. But then they were ruining all this evidence because the clothes themselves were evidence. And so they felt that the people in the hospital—
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
had they blamed it on the people in the hospital for contaminating all the evidence, so they'd throw it out. And it became pretty clear that what you needed to do was create a kind of a universal language that was spoken by both the people in the hospital, the nurses who were examining the people who came in after a sexual assault, as well as
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
the people in the crime labs and the police officers, so that they all had the same way of thinking about creating a chain of evidence and creating uncontaminated good evidence. So that was where the idea of the rape kit came in.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
So Marty Goddard was running this nonprofit, and she trademarked, under her nonprofit, trademarked the kit as the Vitulo kit. And it became known as that for a long time. And, you know, I've talked to people who worked with her, and they're generally of the opinion that she had to do a lot to...
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
work with the police department and all the different men who were in charge of allowing this system to be built. And so she had to smooth a lot of feathers. And part of that would be putting, you know, that it would be very helpful to have this kit known as the Vitulo kit and look very much, have the imprimatur of the police department And have a man's name on it, essentially.
Fresh Air
The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Yes, absolutely. And she was, you know, I don't think she was interested in taking credit for She was just really interested in getting it done. But, you know, so much of the research I did when I looked at all the newspapers from the time, you know, all the reporters were going to Marty Goddard to talk about, oh, this new system.