Military sexual assault victims break the silence

Military sexual assault victims break the silence
Brian Lewis, left, a former sailor in the U.S. Navy, testifies before the Subcommittee on Personnel of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services about the sexual assault committed against him while in the service. (Algerina Perna, Baltimore Sun)

Brian Lewis figures he could have dealt with the rape.

It's the Navy's response to the attack that still haunts the Baltimore native.









But the disparities do not end there. The Sun found that when men do report a sexual assault, military authorities are less likely to identify a suspect, to refer charges to court-martial or to discharge the alleged perpetrator than in cases in which the victim is a woman.


"For young men, the military justice system is the last place they would seek remedy," says Nancy J. Parrish, president of Protect Our Defenders, a Washington-based advocacy group for sexual assault victims of both genders. "Male victims face more obstacles, more prejudice against them, more disbelief, more efforts to silence and humiliate them."



"You have an environment that values strength and values the warrior ethos," says Nate Galbreath, the top civilian adviser to the Pentagon's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. "And, of course, when any man is sexually assaulted, they really wonder whether or not they fit into this warrior culture. But what we're trying to get across to men is that warriors not only know how to fight, they also know how to ask for help."



"It makes you do a complete about-face in the way that you view the world," says Lewis, who was 20 when he was assaulted in 2000. "Really, it's a day-to-night experience."





But they also want something more: A change in the way sexual assault is viewed, both inside the military and out. It isn't a women's issue, the men say, but a problem that can affect anyone.


Michael F. Matthews, a 20-year veteran of the Air Force, says people have become "complacent" with the idea of a woman being raped. "A lot of times, they blow it off. They say, 'Yeah, she might be lying, she might have changed her mind afterwards, was she drinking, what was she wearing?'"

Matthews, a victim of sexual assault, adds, "All those things get thrown out the window when you start talking about a heterosexual man. I'm not looking to have sex with a guy. It doesn't matter what I was wearing.


'Everybody's vulnerable'



"I did taekwondo and I boxed," says Matthews, now 59, married and living in New Mexico. "And guess what? Everybody's vulnerable. … They can slip something in your drink. They can knock you out from behind. They can jump you from in front — depends on how many guys they got. You can't fend off three people."


Greg Jeloudov's mistake was being different. Born and raised in Russia, he lived for years in Ireland, which gave his English a distinctive hybrid accent. Before he joined the Army, he worked as an actor (he had a small role in the Mel Gibson film "Braveheart"). By the time he enlisted in 2009, he was older than many of his fellow recruits.

When Jeloudov arrived for basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., he says, the taunting began immediately: "You commie fag, you Russian fag. You actors, you're all faggots."


And then, the chilling warning: "We're going to teach you a lesson."


"I go and try to explain it to one of the commanders. He just said, 'Why did you tell them about the acting? Why did you tell them anything about Russia? This would never have happened if you had kept your mouth shut.' So I'm to blame."

Jeloudov was asked if he knew the names of his attackers. He didn't.

He says he was told the assault must not have happened.

"From that point on," says Jeloudov, 39, now homeless in San Francisco, "there was no point in saying anything."



It "isn't necessarily seen as a sexual act," says Canaff, a former prosecutor in New York and Virginia. "It's seen as a humiliating act. It's the ultimate act of emasculation.


Heath Phillips endured months of such harassment. Seventeen when he entered the Navy from a small town in upstate New York, he was everyone's little brother at boot camp in the Orlando Naval Training Center in Florida and at advanced training in Meridian, Miss.


"My first night, there's a group of men — 'Hey, why don't you come hang out with us?' you know? And I thought, 'Cool.'"

He says he went with them to a hotel in New York City. Phillips had two drinks — "I really wasn't much of a drinker" — and passed out.




"Everything escalated from there," he says. "It turned to 'game on,' you know? 'Oh, look, we didn't get in trouble, they didn't believe him.'

"It was a constant harassment. These guys would terrorize me daily," including pulling him out of bed and rubbing their genitals in his face. "And I was always called liar."

'Different for men'

Phillips, Jeloudov and Lewis were unusual in at least trying to report their assaults. Matthews, like most, didn't bother.

"I knew nothing good was going to come of it," he says. "I wanted to spend 20 years in the Air Force. I wasn't going to be able to make a career out of it if I came forward."


Of those, just 247 sought a criminal investigation.




Terri Spahr Nelson, author of "For Love of Country: Confronting Rape and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military," says male victims face an additional obstacle: gender expectations in a culture that celebrates the strong, stoic warrior.

"It's definitely different for men," says Nelson, a social worker and sometime Pentagon consultant who served in the Army during the early 1980s. "For men coming forward in the military and being able to report a sexual assault, they're really having to cross that pretty heavy barrier of not being seen as weak — or even, in some cases, being accused of being homosexual."

After Lewis was attacked, he returned to work on the Frank Cable. But everything had changed. Word of the incident had spread, he says, and he "quickly became the social outcast."

"It's almost like a virus people are afraid they'll catch," he says. "And they want to avoid it, because they see what's happening to you."


Lewis likens sexual assault in the military to incest. In the early days, he had to continue seeing his perpetrator — "there's only so many places to run inside a 600-foot ship" — as fellow sailors took sides.

"There were even some isolated pockets of 'This guy has a family — why are you trying to wreck his life?'¿"


"I began a long downward spiral," Lewis says. "I was walking the piers and looking at ships all day and wondering where the next attack would come from."




"You end up getting victims that are often perceived to be of less value to the military," Canaff says.


Addressing the problem

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has called sexual assault "a threat to the discipline and the cohesion of our force" that "must be stamped out."


Galbreath, who joined the office in 2007, describes a sea change in the military's efforts since then — particularly during the past two years under Hagel and his predecessor, Leon Panetta.

"I've heard Brian Lewis' account and what he had to go through, and it just breaks my heart that in the years that he served, there just wasn't this kind of program available for him," says Galbreath, a criminal investigator turned clinical psychologist. "I would offer that if Brian had experienced sexual assault in the military today, his experience would be fundamentally different."

Today, Galbreath says, a service member who is assaulted is assigned a victim advocate to guide him or her through the system, and, beginning this year, a special victims' counsel — a trained attorney to represent him or her in any legal proceedings.


Another key development: The 2011 repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Officials and advocates believe the ban on openly gay service members chilled reporting by male victims, gay and straight alike.


Victims and their advocates say that program and other steps are positive, but don't go far enough. They say the small percentages of victims who report and convictions that result argue for comprehensive change.

"Things remain very bad," says Baltimore attorney Susan Burke, who represents dozens of sexual assault victims, male and female, in actions against the military. "Until you create an impartial judicial system, you continue to empower the wrong people. The biases and corruption persist."

Burke and others want Congress to take prosecutions out of the chain of command — where a commander has the sole authority to refer charges to court-martial or not, and to uphold the jury's findings or ignore them.

"The system is rigged in favor of the assailant," says Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat. "So much so that you have the vast majority, a supermajority of the victims not reporting it, which means the assailants, sexual predators, continue to operate on other people."


"Because the system is closed, commanders make the rules," she says. "And men are supposed to be tough and suck it up, and there's even less interest to provide services or take their cases seriously."

The effort has run into opposition from military leaders and their supporters in Congress. The Democratic-controlled Senate declined to take up the issue last week. Speier describes her campaign in the Republican-controlled House as "a marathon, not a sprint."


"We should try to fix this through the commander, and not around them," Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in June.

Wasting a life away

After his discharge, Lewis returned home to Brooklyn Park and, in his words, "wasted my life away." He let his hair grow, gained weight, cut himself.

"I just generally didn't care whether I lived from one moment to the next," he says.


"Suddenly, they have this big conflict on their hands," she says. "And they start to question their masculinity, the way they were presenting to other people, if people got the wrong impression."


"The lasting impacts can be really broad," she says.








"It's like, instead of running on all four cylinders, I'm running on one," he says. "My family can't figure it out. They see who I am, which is this talented, intelligent person, but they can't put the two together. 'Why does he end up in a homeless shelter? He can't keep a job. He can't do this. He can't do that.'

"I'm not able to be the person I want to be."




He appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary "The Invisible War," about assaults of men and women, and "Justice Denied," co-produced by Matthews' wife, which focuses on men.


And he has returned to school. He earned a master's degree in forensic studies from Stevenson University this month and is set to begin law school next fall. Upon graduation, he says, he wants to work on behalf of service members and veterans.

"From 2001 to the beginning of 2008, I just wasted my life away because I just couldn't get it through my head that there had to be something better waiting," he says.

"This is better. Advocating is better."

Eugene Tauber, a Tribune Newspapers database editor, assisted with research for this article.