The latest rape case to come out of Maryville, Missouri may sound similar to the infamous Steubenville High School case, but the biggest difference is the number of victims.
And while much attention surrounding the deplorable situation has focused on victim Daisy Coleman, a second victim has stepped forward to tell her story.
Paige Parkhurst was 13-years-old in January 2012 when she and Coleman (then 14-years-old) were allegedly raped by Maryville High School football player Matthew Barnett and another teenage boy. Parkhurst told Al Jazeera in an interview her reasons for coming forth now — because the fact that people are listening is “like a miracle.”
When she and Coleman were first assaulted, she says they didn’t have “this kind of support.” Coleman’s mother was even fired from her job and their house mysteriously burned down. The town of Maryville shunned the victims, the charges against the boys were dropped, and just recently, the sheriff of Maryville slammed the hacker group Anonymous for getting involved, saying that the members needed to “get jobs” and leave the case alone.
Here is Parkhurst’s side of the story:
And we got there, and they just started handing [Daisy Coleman] drink after drink after drink. And they had separated us as soon as we got there. And another boy that was there with me, had taken me into another room, and had sexually assaulted me, after me telling him no, pushing him away. And after he was done, he made me go back out into the living room with him, and we sat and waited until Matt was done with Daisy. And I had walked into Matt’s room, and she was incoherent. She couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, and just was talking like a baby pretty much.
… I was intoxicated before we left the house. She [Daisy] was also, but they gave her even more when she got there. They drug [sic] her out of his bedroom window, drug [sic] her to the car, and then they were going to drop us off, but they were freaking out, trying to think of how they were going to drop us off without any of her brothers waking up. And they took her and carried her to the back corner of her house and left her there. And they told me to go inside, that all she needed to do was to sober up, and that she would be okay, and they were gonna be there and watch her.
In the end, she told Al Jazeera that she would “like justice to be done.”
“And I would like to be able to know that there was something to be done, and that our voice didn’t go unheard.”
We’ll keep you updated on the latest in this case.
SOURCE: Al Jazeera, Gawker | PHOTO CREDIT: Screengrab/Al Jezeera
