This book threads together the lives of three women through their shared experience of sexual assault: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford; the book’s author, Pagan Kennedy; and the inventor of the rape kit, Martha “Marty” Goddard.
Kennedy grew up in similar circumstances and went to the same school as Blasey Ford, whose 2018 testimony during the hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, resonated. As Kennedy described, “like her, I had been the collateral damage. The future presidents, generals, CIA operatives, lobbyists, and justices had to learn how to dominate, how to be ruthless. And so when we were young, they … practiced their craft on girls like us. And there had been no way to defend ourselves against those golden boys, the ones who could do no wrong.” (pp.4-5)
The Kavanaugh hearings led Kennedy to consider how the rape kit ever came to exist in a world designed for and dominated by men. What Kennedy found was that while a man, Louis Vitullo, a Chicago police sergeant, was credited with developing the first rape kit in the 1970s, it was actually Marty Goddard who came up with the idea. Goddard worked in a crisis center and as a result, she realized that the legal and medical systems were not designed to facilitate crosstalk or collaboration. And, yet, in cases of sexual assault, that was exactly what was needed. Medical personnel needed to collect data that could be used as evidence in a court of law. Goddard’s kit aimed to decrease this gap by standardizing the methodology and educating professionals in both systems for the benefit of victims.
Kennedy tells the story from her own perspective as she sought to find Marty Goddard who disappeared into anonymity after more than a decade of actively working to develop and promote the kit, including securing funding from an unlikely source — the Playboy Foundation. Kennedy’s first-person perspective as she sought to retrace Marty’s life takes readers on the journey with her. Sadly, the clues led Kennedy to learn of Marty’s troubled relationship with her father as a child and a sexual assault at knifepoint in the late 1970s while she was promoting the rape kit and advocating for victims of such assaults. Kennedy also describes Marty’s final years. In 1983, she took a position awarded by the Illinois attorney general in which she was tasked with awarding grants to victims of crimes. Her efforts took on an obsessiveness that led her to fall out of touch with many in her life, eventually leading to a life of obscurity. Sadly, Marty’s later years were marked by financial struggles, alcoholism and mental decline. She died in Arizona in 2015.
This book reads as a mystery seeking to understand what happened to Marty Goddard, but it also provides a detailed look at the 1970s and beyond when it comes to the evolution of women’s rights. It’s a quick, but important, read for understanding how much some women gave to expand protections and rights for women in the U.S.
Contributed by: Charlotte A. Moser, MS
This book threads together the lives of three women through their shared experience of sexual assault: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford; the book’s author, Pagan Kennedy; and the inventor of the rape kit, Martha “Marty” Goddard.
Kennedy grew up in similar circumstances and went to the same school as Blasey Ford, whose 2018 testimony during the hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, resonated. As Kennedy described, “like her, I had been the collateral damage. The future presidents, generals, CIA operatives, lobbyists, and justices had to learn how to dominate, how to be ruthless. And so when we were young, they … practiced their craft on girls like us. And there had been no way to defend ourselves against those golden boys, the ones who could do no wrong.” (pp.4-5)
The Kavanaugh hearings led Kennedy to consider how the rape kit ever came to exist in a world designed for and dominated by men. What Kennedy found was that while a man, Louis Vitullo, a Chicago police sergeant, was credited with developing the first rape kit in the 1970s, it was actually Marty Goddard who came up with the idea. Goddard worked in a crisis center and as a result, she realized that the legal and medical systems were not designed to facilitate crosstalk or collaboration. And, yet, in cases of sexual assault, that was exactly what was needed. Medical personnel needed to collect data that could be used as evidence in a court of law. Goddard’s kit aimed to decrease this gap by standardizing the methodology and educating professionals in both systems for the benefit of victims.
Kennedy tells the story from her own perspective as she sought to find Marty Goddard who disappeared into anonymity after more than a decade of actively working to develop and promote the kit, including securing funding from an unlikely source — the Playboy Foundation. Kennedy’s first-person perspective as she sought to retrace Marty’s life takes readers on the journey with her. Sadly, the clues led Kennedy to learn of Marty’s troubled relationship with her father as a child and a sexual assault at knifepoint in the late 1970s while she was promoting the rape kit and advocating for victims of such assaults. Kennedy also describes Marty’s final years. In 1983, she took a position awarded by the Illinois attorney general in which she was tasked with awarding grants to victims of crimes. Her efforts took on an obsessiveness that led her to fall out of touch with many in her life, eventually leading to a life of obscurity. Sadly, Marty’s later years were marked by financial struggles, alcoholism and mental decline. She died in Arizona in 2015.
This book reads as a mystery seeking to understand what happened to Marty Goddard, but it also provides a detailed look at the 1970s and beyond when it comes to the evolution of women’s rights. It’s a quick, but important, read for understanding how much some women gave to expand protections and rights for women in the U.S.
Contributed by: Charlotte A. Moser, MS