The teenage girl at the center of an alleged rape case in Missouri wrote about her experience in vivid detail on Friday, adding another layer to a controversy that has brought international attention to a rural Midwestern town.
Daisy Coleman, who says that she and her friend were raped by two 17-year-old boys in early 2012, wrote in a blog post that her life since that January night “has been a long, reckless winter.”
Recalling the vicious backlash she and her family have endured in Maryville, Mo., since she made her accusation, Coleman wrote on the blog xojane: “Why would I even want to believe in a God? Why would a God even allow this to happen? I lost all faith in religion and humanity. I saw myself as ugly, inside and out. If I was this ugly on the inside, then why shouldn’t everyone see the ugly I saw?”
The case — which a county prosecutor dropped two months after a report was filed, for what he called a lack of evidence and the victims’ refusal to cooperate — sparked greater interest months later when the hacking activist group Anonymous campaigned on Coleman’s behalf online.
Greater media scrutiny of the case let to more outcry — one of the accused boys is the grandson of a prominent local politician — and also led the county prosecutor, Robert Rice, to request Wednesday that a special prosecutor reexamine the case.
Coleman, who was 14 at the time, alleges that she was left on her family’s front porch in below-freezing temperatures after she says the boys raped her.
Read more excerpts from her post — titled “I’m Daisy Coleman, The Teenager At The Center Of The Maryville Rape Media Storm, And This Is What Really Happened” — below:
Days seemed to drag on as I watched my brother get bullied and my mom lose her job. Ultimately our house burned to the ground.
On Twitter and Facebook, I was called a skank and a liar and people encouraged me to kill myself. Twice, I did try to take my own life.
When I went to a dance competition I saw a girl there who was wearing a T-shirt she made. It read: “Matt 1, Daisy 0.”