Daisy Coleman was a cheerleader at Maryville High School in Maryville, Missouri. Matthew Barnett was on the football team.
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.”