What Daisy Coleman Changed

Before the recent campus anti-rape move, earlier Brock Turner, a 14-year-old girl was terrorized for speaking out.

Photo: Brian Ach/Getty Images for the World Childhood Foundation

Photograph: Brian Ach/Getty Images for the Globe Childhood Foundation

Photo: Brian Ach/Getty Images for the World Childhood Foundation

When I offset saw that Daisy Coleman'due south mom, Melinda Coleman, had died past suicide on Monday, I felt too distressing and sick to read the article. Her death is a tragedy coming at the end of a relentless series of tragedies. Daisy herself died by suicide four months and 4 days ago — viii years after she says she was raped at historic period 14, then dumped in front of her house, unconscious, in freezing weather, and harassed out of town in the following months. What the Coleman family unit has endured should feel unthinkable, but it'due south not unthinkable at all, really: It's the story of a community viciously avenging itself on a teen girl who has the gall to report to the police force that she was raped while barely conscious, which ways it could exist the story of any number of modest towns in America.

But the depth of the cruelty, and the lengths to which some residents of Maryville, Missouri, allegedly went, are amazing. I night in January 2012, Daisy Coleman and a friend snuck out to come across Matthew Barnett, a pop 17-year-old football game player Coleman had been texting. Coleman said Barnett gave her alcohol — one big glass, then another — then raped her while she was too drunk to form coherent sentences. One of his friends allegedly recorded the attack on his phone. After Melinda and Daisy went to the police force, the town turned on them. The Coleman children were bullied out of schoolhouse; Melinda was fired from her job; and eventually the family moved away. In April, someone burned their empty home to the ground. Other, smaller details are stunning in their mundane, almost cheerful viciousness — shortly subsequently the declared attack, for example, a daughter showed upwardly to a school trip the light fantastic competition wearing a homemade shirt that read "Matt i, Daisy 0."

What happened to Daisy Coleman was bloodcurdling merely not unfamiliar. It was simply afterwards mass outrage over a similar assault that took identify in Steubenville, Ohio, several months later on — an incapacitated teenager was raped at a political party while her peers gleefully photographed and live-tweeted the assault — that Maryville drew media attention. I remember the stories I started hearing when I was around 14 years old. The girl was ever the butt of the joke. She got too fucked up and "allow" a guy or a bunch of guys "hook up" with her. I remember watching upperclassmen snicker crudely at younger girls who ended up in some basement like the one Daisy and her friend found themselves in, accepting too-total drink later too-total drink, trying to seem impressive, trying to stay upright. How many assault stories go passed effectually as careless gossip or cruel jokes?

These are realizations that feel obvious afterward MeToo, after Maryville and Steubenville. But Daisy'south story broke in a drastically dissimilar media climate. Information technology'due south not shocking that she was harassed past her peers and their families and disregarded past the police department; the allegations that she was left discarded in the common cold and barely conscious after her assault aren't surprising either. What is astonishing, in retrospect, is that the Coleman family was so resolute in demanding justice.

Melinda was relentless in trying to go her daughter's story heard and taken seriously, even as her neighbors whispered that she was a "crazy bitch," and her children were tormented at school. "She would come to the sheriff's part on an almost daily basis," Maryville'due south sheriff told the Star. "I would sit downward with her and effort to answer her questions and explicate to her what was going on. And the side by side twenty-four hour period she'd bear witness upward, and we'd go through the same thing over again. It was like living through the picture show Groundhog Twenty-four hour period." It was non a very long-lived Groundhog Day: After two months, prosecutors dropped the felony sexual set on charge against Barnett. Reflecting on how his part handled the case, a yr subsequently, the sheriff said Melinda "clearly has bug."

"We did our job," he added. "We did it well. It'south unfortunate that they are unhappy. I gauge they're simply going to accept to get over it."

Undeterred, Daisy went on to dedicate her life to advocating for survivors. She founded a peer-to-peer organisation, SafeBAE, to raise awareness of sexual assault in heart and high schools, and told her story in heartbreaking detail in a 2022 Netflix documentary, Audrie & Daisy. Even every bit she fought tirelessly for others, though, she continued to struggle with suicidal ideation. In a post memorializing her daughter, Melinda wrote, "I wish I could take taken the pain from her! She never recovered from what those boys did to her, and information technology'due south just not fair." It's a deep, burning sense of unfairness.

Revisiting Daisy'southward story now, I'yard struck by the sense that she helped catalyze a movement that came as well late for her. The outrage over what happened in Maryville and Steubenville resulted in a furious national discussion about sexual violence, ability, accountability, drinking and consent, police negligence, and our immense hostility towards women as a culture. It is a furious national give-and-take we proceed having, in different versions and variations, to the point of about-exhaustion — merely 1 that seems to exist straining, at to the lowest degree, toward a identify of more than understanding, of increased solidarity with victims. All the organizing that happened after Daisy spoke out may not necessarily exist a direct result but is certainly a ripple effect: the new campus anti-rape movement, followed by the backlash over Brock Turner, followed by the sudden ubiquity of MeToo equally both a hashtag and a rallying cry.

Just my sense of hope is restrained by thwarting and anger — all this speaking out, and so many rapists and their enablers remain in positions of power. Coming forward with a sexual assault allegation can still be life-ruining. I don't know what justice would look like for someone who suffered as the Colemans did; I am certain our current criminal-justice organisation is incapable of providing information technology. Still, there is small comfort in thinking about how much things accept changed in the last eight years, and how much they might continue to change, and how Daisy and Melinda had a hand in that. What might things be similar 8 years from now, and eight later on that?

What Daisy Coleman Changed