Woman at center of alleged Naval Academy gang rape testifies for first time

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NBC NEWS, WASHINGTON — The female U.S. Naval Academy midshipman at the center of a sexual assault case testified for the first time Wednesday, describing the events that led to three of her fellow midshipmen allegedly attacking her.

The three men — Tra’ves Bush, Eric Graham and Joshua Tate —are accused of sexually assaulting the woman on April 14, 2012 after she passed out drunk at a party.

During her testimony at the preliminary hearing Wednesday, the female midshipman, said she remembered waking up with back pain and few memories of the previous night.

“I noticed I was really disheveled,” she testified. “I was really nerve-racked because I didn’t know what had happened.”

Later that day, Tate, who had invited her to the party, told her that she had sex with him and Graham, she testified.

“He was like, ‘What? You don’t remember?'” she said. “He told me that we had sex and he was going to have to refresh my memory.”

“He was laughing,” she added, “and then I was like, ‘I don’t want to hear anymore.'”

The Article 32 hearing, held at D.C.’s Navy Yard, is one of the highest-profile military sexual assault cases since President Obama made his first public condemnation of such actions, at the Naval Academy’s commencement ceremony in May.

“It only takes the misconduct of a few to further erode the people’s trust in their government,” Obama said that day in Annapolis, Md.

The results of this case, and others like it, may have policy implications for how the military deals with reports of sexual assault, which have increased exponentially in recent years. A Pentagon study estimated that unwanted sexual contact in the military jumped by 37 percent in 2012 to 26,000 cases.

Several pieces of legislation that would change the reporting and prosecution structure of such military code violations is currently making its way through Congress, and cases like this one have the potential to draw the attention of, and potentially influence, public opinion towards sexual assault in the military.

The alleged victim, who was in her sophomore or “youngster” year at the Academy when the alleged attack occurred, said during her direct testimony Wednesday that she had been drinking heavily that day. She was only 20, at the time, under the legal drinking age.

She and several friends had gone to an off-campus residence, known as the “Football House,” for a “Togas and Yogas”-themed party, in which men dressed in togas and women in yoga pants. The atmosphere was frenzied, she said, with hundreds of guests, many spread out on the front lawn, and a Disney-themed bounce house in the yard.

She said that as she kept drinking, her recollection of the night faded to snippets: first dancing with friends, then sitting on a bed as Bush stood over her. The woman and Bush had recently ended a casual sexual relationship, she said.

During cross-examination with Bush’s defense counsel, she said she could not definitively recall whether or not she and Bush had had sex in the bedroom, but that he had subsequently told her that he had informed investigators from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) that they had, in fact, had sex.

The next snippet the woman said she remembered was crouching down in a car later that night, with two of the other alleged attackers, Graham and Tate, as well as one other Academy classmate.

She recalled Graham’s body angled towards her, she said, and that she repeatedly said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and felt upset at the time. The rest of her time in the car was a blank, she said, with her final memory of the night being falling asleep on a couch inside the house.

The next day, she said she woke up, feeling groggy, and began talking to another Navy football player who was cleaning up the house. She said she told him her back hurt and asked him to feel the knots in her back, which he agreed were large.

About 45 minutes later, the woman testified that she and the player had consensual sex, after which he suggested she get a ride back to the Academy with his friends. Entering his friends’ car, she realized it was the same one she had been in the night before, and noticed there was an open, empty condom wrapper on the floor of the car.

Trying to piece together the rest of the night, the woman texted Tate, asking him to come to her dorm room. While waiting for him, she noticed derogatory comments being made on social media by her classmates towards an unnamed woman. One Twitter message read, she testified, “She’s loving the crew, that’s my ho too.”

When Tate arrived, she asked if they had had sex. “What, you don’t remember?” she says he asked, with what she described as a “suggestive” look on his face. “I’m going to have to refresh your memory, then,” he added.

She asked if she had also had sex with Graham, to which he responded that she had been “too turnt up,” slang for excessively drunk, and said they had indeed had sex.

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