"Jeannie Vanasco has had the same nightmare since she was a teenager. She startles awake, saying his name. It is always about him: one of her closest high school friends, a boy named Mark. A boy who raped her. When her nightmares worsen, Jeannie decides after fourteen years of silence to reach out to Mark. He agrees to talk on the record and meet in person. “Its the least I can do,” he says. Jeannie details her friendship with Mark before and...

"Girl in the Woods is Aspen Matis's exhilarating true-life adventure of hiking from Mexico to Canada--a coming-of-age story, a survival story, and a triumphant story of overcoming emotional devastation. On her second night of college, Aspen was raped by a fellow student. Overprotected by her parents who discouraged her from telling of the attack, Aspen was confused and ashamed. Dealing with a problem that has sadly become all too common on college...

In September 2005, Liz Seccuro's world turned upside down when she
received an apology letter from the man who had raped her twenty-two
years earlier. The rape, which occurred when she was a
seventeen-year-old freshman at the University of Virginia, was reported
to the campus police, but their inquiry led nowhere. The man accused of
raping her left the university soon after, and Seccuro tried to put the
incident behind

...

Two-year-old Rachel Haines didn't know that she would be committing to twenty-one years of hard work, dedication, and perseverance as she jumped into the foam pit during her first "mommy and me" gymnastics class. She had no idea that one day she would become a two-time National Team Member, two-time National Champion, and a Division I college gymnast at the University of Minnesota. Nor could she have known that she had just signed herself up for serious...

January 1992. Winslow was a student at Carnegie Mellon University when she was brutally attacked and raped. In fall 2013, living in Cambridge, she received news that the police had found her rapist through a DNA match. Caught between past and present, and between two very different cultures, Winslow began her own investigation into her attacker's family and past, reconnected with the detectives of her case, and worked with prosecutors in the months...

In this searing memoir, the author, "the girl" at the center of the infamous Roman Polanski sexual assault case, breaks a virtual thirty-five year silence to tell her story and reflect on the events of that day and their lifelong repercussions. March 1977, Southern California. Roman Polanski drives a rented Mercedes along Mulholland Drive to Jack Nicholson's house. Sitting next to him is an aspiring actress, Samantha Geimer, recently arrived from...

In 1993, Donna Palomba was raped by a masked assailant in her own home. Yet, her story is more than a victim's tale of physical and emotional recovery. It is a story of one woman's hunt for justice while fending off attacks by institutions designed to defend and protect her, the police department, the local government, and a community clinging to an outrageous claim that Donna had invented the crime to cover up a sexual affair. After eleven years...

"Lacy Johnson was held prisoner in a soundproofed room in a basement apartment that her ex-boyfriend rented and outfitted for the sole purpose of raping and killing her. She escaped, but not unscathed. The Other Side is the haunting account of a first passionate and then abusive relationship, the events leading to Johnson's kidnapping and imprisonment, her dramatic escape, and her hard-fought struggle to recover. At once thrilling, terrifying, harrowing,...

A scientist and expert on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder describes her own journey through trauma and its lingering effects after repressing and disassociating her own ordeal as the victim of an unsolved sexual assault as a teenager.

Bipolar Faith is both spiritual autobiography and a memoir of mental illness. In this powerful book, Monica A. Coleman shares her life-long dance with trauma, depression, and the threat of death. Coleman offers a rare account of how the modulated highs of bipolar II can lead to professional success, while hiding a depression that even her doctors rarely believed. Only as she was able to face her illness was she able to live faithfully with bipolar....