Culture
Book Review: ‘The Secret History of the Rape Kit,’ by Pagan Kennedy
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RAPE KIT: A True Crime Story, by Pagan Kennedy
In 2021, the Smithsonian acquired something called the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit for Sexual Assault Examination. It was a 10-by-6-inch cardboard container filled mostly with items you could buy at any pharmacy, but for millions of American women, the “rape kit,” as this 1970s invention is now known, was a revolution in a box.
Oh, and one important detail: The Chicago police sergeant Louis Vitullo didn’t invent the kit that initially bore his name. That credit goes to Martha “Marty” Goddard, a determined, soft-spoken woman who came up with the idea of a consistent set of tools to collect evidence after an assault — but then disappeared before it became the national standard it is today.
How Goddard dreamed up her creation is the central question of “The Secret History of the Rape Kit,” by Pagan Kennedy, a journalist with a “feverish obsession” with the subject. “How,” she asks, “does a tool that empowers women ever get built in a man’s world?”
Out of necessity, in this case. As a volunteer at a Chicago crisis center, Goddard began to see “a dark and terrible underworld” of young rape survivors. She set about understanding their experiences, wheedling her way into local police departments and interviewing hospital and crime-lab personnel to learn what it would take to solve cases.
Solving cases at all was a novel idea, apparently. Kennedy argues convincingly that not much had changed in the 400 years between when an English judge dismissed rape as “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved,” and 1970s Chicago, where a police training manual taught that “it is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge” against “a boyfriend with a roving eye.” When officers did do forensic exams, she writes, they were “Kabuki theater” usually designed to expose a mendacious woman, or to conveniently convict a nearby Black male. Physical evidence was lost; victims were left humiliated; justice was rare.
What if, Goddard wondered, there were a consistent, court-approved way of collecting the evidence that would bolster a survivor’s word? Her assembly of tools — bags for semen or fingernail samples, swabs, a tiny comb for pubic hair — was nothing fancy, but she persuaded the Playboy Foundation to design the packaging. The result had an air of professionalism — and sincerity. It “promised to treat a victim with dignity, as an eyewitness whose body might reveal real evidence of a violent crime.”
Its namesake, Vitullo, screamed at Goddard when she presented him with her proposal, but subsequently embraced the idea — and Goddard, understanding that law enforcement would more readily accept the kit if it bore a man’s name, helped “collaborate in her own erasure.” The history of that erasure is a fascinating subplot of this book, as Kennedy traces the way generations of canny American women have been denied credit and profit and glory for their brainchildren.
And Goddard did more than just devise the kit — she proselytized for it across the country. She added cards that shared counseling resources, and forms for police officers to sign — meaning they could be held accountable for losing evidence. She spoke to Girl Scouts, church groups, and F.B.I. criminologists. By the mid-1980s, her invention was everywhere.
But if you’ve heard of the rape kit, you’ve probably also heard of the rape-kit backlog. During the 1990s, cities slashed funding for collecting rape evidence, and literal mold grew on Goddard’s invention, with hundreds of thousands of untested kits piling up. When investigators opened one storage unit in Detroit in 2009, they discovered more than 11,000 rape kits — three decades of evidence from victims ranging in age from one month to 90 years old.
Outrage erupted, and once kits began to be widely tested the results offered what Kennedy calls “spectacular proof” of their value. Old crimes were solved. Myths about serial rapists were debunked. And false convictions dropped; as DNA testing became more widespread, fewer Black men were wrongfully convicted of the rape of white women than in prior decades, per one report.
Marty Goddard had vanished from public life by the time all this happened, and Kennedy works to solve her “mysterious disappearance.” But the truth she eventually uncovers feels beside the point. There is another equally urgent narrative here, and it’s Kennedy’s own. She herself, she confides, was molested as a child — and the brutally economical descriptions of the violence she endured are the real “true crime story” of the book, a tiny handful of passages that rise off the page, incandescent.
For most of her life, Kennedy kept her memories and her anger to herself: “My rage had always seemed greasy and salty, like something I binged on when I was alone, in fits of self-hatred.” When she wrote an earlier version of Goddard’s story, she spent days inserting and then deleting a single mention of her own experience, wishing she could bury “molested” somehow “so that just a bit of the word poked up, like the tip of a bombshell. Did I deserve to make any kind of claim at all?”
Too many readers will recognize that doubt, and Kennedy’s love for her subject reverberates throughout the book. Kennedy’s own mother hadn’t understood what happened to her, but Goddard, she writes, “was the woman who had believed little girls.”
There’s a heartbreaking passage in which Kennedy explains her decision not to name her assailant. She opts not to do so, she writes, “because I have no physical evidence, nothing compelling to back up my account.”
Marty Goddard provided a way to preserve that evidence, for generations of victims. No wonder Kennedy wanted to tell this forgotten story. And along the way, her own.
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RAPE KIT: A True Crime Story | By Pagan Kennedy | Vintage | 256 pp. | Paperback, $19
Judith Barnard, a freelance writer who stumbled on a second career as a best-selling author at 50, when she teamed with her husband, Michael Fain, a onetime aerospace engineer, to publish a potboiler novel under the pen name Judith Michael, died on May 6 in Chicago. She was 94.
Her death, at a hospital near her home, was caused by heart failure, her daughter, Cynthia Barnard, said.
Combining their first names to create the pseudonym Judith Michael, the couple published 11 commercially successful novels over the years, starting with “Deceptions,” an out-of-nowhere hit, in 1982.
Equal parts romance and thriller, “Deceptions” concerned identical twin sisters — Sabrina, a globe-trotting socialite living in London, and Stephanie, a suburban Illinois housewife — whose fleeting experiment with swapping lives proved to be less fleeting than expected.
Entertaining, yes. A Kirkus review called it “a strenuously inventive, big-budget” romance.
High literature? Not so much. The same review described the book as “glossily seamless nonsense” but noted its potential as fodder for a TV movie — an observation that proved prescient when NBC adapted it in 1985 as a two-part mini-series with Stefanie Powers, of “Hart to Hart” fame, playing the twins.
Then again, their plan had never been to give Thomas Pynchon a run for his money.
Ms. Barnard had already taken a stab at a literary career, publishing her first novel, “The Past and Present of Solomon Sorge,” in 1967. An introspective tale about a Midwestern university professor whose wife of 30 years abruptly abandons him, the book sold only a few thousand copies, leading Ms. Barnard to turn to freelance work on educational films and textbooks, as well as writing articles for Chicago magazines and newspapers.
Her literary horizons expanded after she married Mr. Fain, her second husband, in 1979. “We were looking for something we could do together,” she recalled in a 1991 interview with The Chicago Tribune. “Michael had written technical articles and liked the process but hadn’t found a field he was happy in.”
They began by writing articles about marriage and family for newspapers and magazines, including Good Housekeeping and Redbook. “We had such a good time working together that one day Michael said, ‘Enough of this! Why don’t we write a book?’” Ms. Barnard recalled in a 1999 interview with The Ledger of Lakeland, Fla.
With “Deceptions,” they discovered a winning formula that they employed with many of their following books — what they called universal fantasies, about ordinary, if strong-willed, people who, by a stroke of fate, escape a quotidian existence to taste a life of wealth and adventure, only to face unforeseen challenges along the way.
In “Possessions” (1984), for example, a Vancouver mother of two, whose shady businessman of a husband vanishes, begins a glamorous new life as a jewelry designer in San Francisco, only to fall in with the wealthy family that he had concealed from her.
Similarly, in “Pot of Gold” (1993), a Connecticut housewife must learn for herself whether more money really does mean more problems after she wins a $60 million lottery.
Like their characters, Ms. Barnard and Mr. Fain found their lives transformed by unexpected success. As novel after novel climbed the best-seller lists, they traveled the world to research their books and divided their time between a spacious 16th-floor apartment overlooking Lincoln Park in Chicago and a second home in Aspen, Colo.
Also like their characters, they learned that success can be complicated — in their case, because it required juggling the usual pressures of marriage with the inevitable Lennon-McCartney-style tug of war that comes with creative collaboration.
As Ms. Barnard told The Ledger, “It’s very difficult to have a working relationship with this person who you think has done really dumb things that day and is going to be in your bed.”
Judith Goldman was born on Feb. 17, 1932, in Denver, the elder of two children of Samuel Goldman, who owned a shoe store, and Ruth (Eisenstat) Goldman.
After her parents divorced when she was a child, her mother married Harry Barnard, a prominent historian and biographer, and moved with her children to Chicago.
The family temporarily relocated to Ohio when she was in high school, and she graduated from Fremont Ross High School in 1949. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the Ohio State University in 1953. The same year, she married Jerre Papier, an electrical engineer. They divorced in 1970.
She met Mr. Fain by chance at a hospital, where both were visiting his ailing mother, a friend of Ms. Barnard’s. “Bittersweet times, as Michael’s mother was dying and we were falling in love,” she told The Ledger.
Once the couple decided to bet on a publishing career, there was no turning back. “We burned all our bridges, both quit our jobs, lived on our savings for one year,” Ms. Barnard said in a 1997 interview with The Oklahoman newspaper of Oklahoma City.
“We didn’t know how hard it would be,” she added. “We just thought it would be wonderful to work together. And it was, after a while.”
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Barnard is survived by Mr. Fain; her son, Andrew Sharpe; five grandchildren; and a brother, David Barnard.
It helped that the couple adhered to a strict division of labor. After what could be months of plotting and laying down a basic outline together, Ms. Barnard then did the writing, while Mr. Fain served as the editor.
“He’s a superb one,” she said in a 1988 interview with The Houston Chronicle. “And sometimes a harsh critic.”
Each book might require five or six drafts, with endless fiddling. When the inevitable disagreements arose, Mr. Fain, an amateur photographer, would disappear into his darkroom to cool off, he told The Ledger, while Ms. Barnard headed to the kitchen to “knead bread and take out her aggressions.”
Then again, their shared career also proved a marital blessing.
As Ms. Barnard once put it, “It probably kept us married because we always had a book to finish.”
As a lifelong fan of romantic comedies, my list of favorite “sweet” romances is extensive.
Not because I have a spice aversion — but because the rom-coms I love most, with that classic cinematic vibe, often come with fewer peppers on the spice scale.
Some people refer to these books as “closed door.” I prefer to think of them as “in the hall” romances (though that admittedly doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same way). The reader is there for all the swoon, the burn and the banter — but when things head to the bedroom, the reader remains out in the hallway. With less focus on what happens inside the boudoir, all that juicy heightened tension and yearning really shine. Here are a few of my favorites.
SEEK THE TRAITOR’S SON, by Veronica Roth
I read Veronica Roth’s new novel for adults, “Seek the Traitor’s Son,” over one weekend and had a hard time putting it down, and not just because I was procrastinating on my house chores.
There’s much about the novel one would expect from Roth, the author of the Divergent series, one of the hottest dystopian young adult series of the 2010s. Thematically, the novels are similar. Like “Divergent,” this new book is also set in an alternate, dystopian version of our world; it is also packed with vivid, present-tense prose full of capitalized labels to let you know that something different is going on; and it also centers on a classic “Chosen One” who is burdened by the mantle of savior she carries.
These are classic tropes, but I, like many other genre fiction fans, enjoy that familiarity. Still, I’m always hoping for a subversion, a tornado twist that sucks me into imagination land.
In “Seek the Traitor’s Son,” our Chosen One is Elegy Ahn, the spare heir of the most powerful woman in Cedre. Elegy likes her life, even if it’s filled with danger. See, some time ago, a virus took over the world. The contagion is strange: Everyone who is infected dies, but 50 percent of the people who die come back to life with mysterious cognitive gifts.
After the outbreak, Earth split into two factions: The dominant Talusar, who worship the Fever, believe it is a divine gift, willingly infect themselves with it and consider anyone who does not submit to it a blasphemer; and Cedre, a small country made up of everyone who rejects the virus and the dogma around it. They are, naturally, at war.
Early in the book, Elegy, solidly on the Cedre side, and Rava Vidar, a brutal Talusar general, are summoned by an order of prophets who tell them: One of you will lead your people to victory over the other, and one of the deciding factors involves an unnamed man whom Elegy is prophesied to fall in love with.
Elegy doesn’t want this. But the prophecy spurs the Talusar into action, and so her mother assigns her a Talusaran refugee as a knight and forces her into the fray as the Hope of Cedre.
If that seems like a lot of setup, don’t worry. That’s just the first few chapters. Besides, if you know those dystopian novel tropes, you’ll get the hang of it. Roth gets through the world exposition quickly, and after a rather jarring time skip, the plot takes off, effectively and entertainingly driving readers to the novel’s exhilarating end.
The strength of “Seek the Traitor’s Son” is Roth’s character work. Elegy is a dynamic heroine. She has a lot to lose, and she leads with love, which is reflected in the intense grief she feels for the people she’s lost in the war and the life the prophecy took from her. It’s love that makes her stop running from her destiny and do what she thinks is right to save the people she has left.
Many authors isolate their characters to back them into bad decisions, so it’s refreshing that Roth has given Elegy a community to support her. Her sister Hela in particular is a treat. She’s refreshingly grounded, and often gives a much needed reprieve from the melodrama of the other characters’ lives. (She has an important subplot that has to do with a glowing alien plant, but the real reason you should pay attention to her is that she’s funny, loves her sister so much, has cool friends and listens to gay romance novels.) Hela and Elegy’s unwavering loyalty to each other casts a positive illumination on both characters.
My favorite character is Theren, Elegy’s knight, who is kind and empathetic to everyone but himself. As the obvious romantic lead, his character most diverges from genre standard because of the nuanced depiction of his trauma. He has been so broken by his experiences that he thinks what he can do with his body is all he can offer, and it’s worth nothing to him.
But like I said, I need subversion, and for all the creative world-building, I didn’t quite get it. The most distinct part of the novel was the setting and structure of alternate Earth, as well as the subcultures born from that setting. But after ripping through the novel, I found that those details didn’t provide nourishment for thought, and the general handwaviness of the technology and history of Earth was distractingly easy to nitpick.
I am a greedy reader, so I want my books to have everything: romance, action, an intellectual theme, novel ideas about the future, and character development. “Seek the Traitor’s Son” comes close. The novel is the first in a series, and I’m willing to hold my reservations until I read the next book. Elegy and Theren are worth it.
SEEK THE TRAITOR’S SON | By Veronica Roth | Tor | 416 pp. | $29
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