The Petition

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1:06Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are live from San Jose talking to NWSL legends Tobin Heath and Kristen Press about their incredible careers, obviously, the rise of the NWSL and what's next after retirement. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

1:31This episode contains a detailed description of sexual violence. Please use discretion. I always feel like this is the hardest part because I never know what to say about myself. Well, my name's Madison Smith. I'm in nursing school right now. I have about a year left. I've been married for almost three years. and I have a wonderful family and probably my littlest best friend would be my one-and-a-half-year-old niece. Madison Smith grew up in Lindsburg, Kansas. Lindsburg is a small town with just under 4 ,000 people. I mean, this is a place where you turn a corner and you see somebody you know.

2:16You don't really see strangers in this town and everybody kind of looks after each other. It's got a very homey feel wherever you go in town. Do people kind of know each other's business a little bit? I would say some people know some people's business. It's not very, like, I don't know everybody's business. But there's, you know, your small-town gossip that the rumor mill goes around town. What about your family, your parents? Were you always close to them? Oh, yeah. My parents and I have always been super close. I know you're not supposed to be like best friends with your kids or anything but it always kind of felt like my parents were Madison liked living in Lindsberg but when she started looking at colleges she thought about leaving Kansas I did have this wild dream of going to Clemson University in South Carolina when I was growing up and I loved I went on a visit there with my aunt and I loved it I fell in love with the campus but that out-of-state tuition, it'll get you every time.

3:20It's really expensive, so I ended up obviously not going there. Instead, Madison went to Bethany College, a small Christian school three blocks from her house. She planned to study biology, and she made a good group of friends. They did game nights every Wednesday and studied in the dorm together after classes. On February 11, 2018, during her second semester of her first year, Madison spent the day with her parents and friends and then headed back to the dorm. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to go do my laundry. And so I go up to my room and I grab my hamper of laundry and I wander down to the laundry room on the first floor.

4:08and in there I see somebody one of my friends uh Jared who I was like oh hey what are you doing you know getting ready to go fold laundry and so I started my laundry and he asked if I wanted to come upstairs and wait with him in his room and I said yeah let's hang out while I'm waiting might as well. And we were listening to music, he grabbed me a beer, which I didn't even drink half of because I don't like beer. But we started hanging out, started making out. It progressed to, we started to have sex, which was consensual up until the point he put his put his hands around my throat and started to squeeze.

5:00He started to strangle me and I had my hand on his wrist and I tried to pull it away and his grip got tighter. He slapped me multiple times across my face, strangled me for probably 20 seconds at a time, multiple times to the point it left bruises on my neck and chest. At one point, he stood up and grabbed me by my hair, and he yanked me up to a sitting position and forced me to give him a blow job. And then he wanted me to turn around and get on all fours. And at that point, he attempted to penetrate me anally. And I don't know how I got away with a no on that one. After he was done, And he went to the bathroom and I got dressed in a hurry.

6:05But before he even went to the bathroom, he said, well, that just happened. And I'm like, that's all you have to say? Like, I know in the back of my mind, he doesn't think that he did anything wrong in the middle of it. And I'm not even fully convinced at this point that I had been raped. So I needed to talk to somebody. I didn't want to be alone because it just felt weird. She saw a text from one of her friends, Alana. Madison went to Alana's room and told her what happened. And at that point, she had me write down what I had felt, what happened, and how it was making me feel. And then I showed her the bruises, and she just started crying with me.

6:55and then I stayed with her for most of the night, but eventually went back to my dorm. And it wasn't until the next day, so it would have been February 12th of 2018, I was sitting in my human anatomy and physiology class and I get a message from Alana and she had been checking in on me all day, so I just wanted to let her know I was fine real quick. So I open it up and she goes, Maddie, I talked to my mom and her mom's an EMT. And she goes, I really think we need to tell your parents what happened. you were raped. You 100 % were raped. We need to tell somebody what happened. And it wasn't until I read the words, Maddie, you were raped, that I believed it.

7:38In 2021, Jared Stolzenberg told the BBC that he regretted what happened. He said he had been rough with Madison. He said he was, quote, new to sex and wanted to try a, quote, sexual kink he'd seen online. He said he was, quote, stupid to try it, but he maintained that it had been consensual. After she read Alana's message, Madison told her parents she'd be coming home for dinner. Alana came with her. When they got to her house, Madison's father was in the driveway. Her mother was on the way. Madison wanted to wait and tell them at the same time. She remembers watching her mother walk up the driveway.

8:24And she could tell that something was weird. And I just kind of looked between her and my dad for a second, and I just ripped the band-aid off. I said, I think I was raped.

8:35It was devastating. I remember asking questions as quick as my head would spin. Who did this to you? What happened? When was this? Are you okay? What do I need to do? I didn't even know where to begin. Mandy Smith, Madison's mother. Madison's father had been a police officer and asked her if they could call the chief of police. Madison said yes. The family sat around the dining room table, waiting. An officer arrived to take her statement. She also gave him the written account she'd made the night before in Alana's room. I think it was difficult for Madison to tell us what had happened and that the sex had started out consensually.

9:26I think she wanted us to not think less of her for being sexually active, which we never would have. But, you know, sometimes those are conversations that are difficult to have with your parents, especially when you're a freshman in college. And then to have to keep telling the story of what happened over and over again to the different agencies, the different people with her parents there. I can't quite imagine how difficult that must have been for her. The police officer who came to their house asked if Madison wanted to take a SANE-SART exam. SANE stands for Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, and SART is Sexual Assault Response Team.

10:11During an exam, evidence is collected for a rape kit. Madison said yes. In the little town of Lindsburg, we don't have a SANE-SART team at the hospital here, so we had to drive out of town for this. They drove to the ER in the next town. And I went back there, and I had pictures taken of my body inside, outside, head to toe, front to back, the whole nine yards. Madison remembers liking the nurse who did her exam. She made her feel comfortable. She even made her laugh. A SANE exam can take hours and can include taking samples of DNA from all over a victim's body from fingernails, mouth, and genitals The nurse noted in Madison's exam that she had bruising on her neck and the back of her throat Madison decided she wanted to press charges People convicted of rape in Kansas are added to a public registry She says that was important to her She had a meeting scheduled with the county attorney to talk about what would happen next Before I met with the county attorney, I was expecting him to say These are the charges we're going to file and here's when we're doing it In my 19-year-old mind, I thought that that's how the world should work and that's what should be done When Madison met with the county attorney, she brought her parents But when they got to the office, the attorney asked to speak with Madison alone which weird like I understand that I'm legally an adult at 19 years old but anyway I start speaking with him and the first thing he said to me was I'm not pressing charges because this wasn't rape this was immature sex in my mind I'm like well one what the hell is immature sex like that doesn't that's not a legal term why are we using that we reached out to the county attorney for clarification and didn't hear back.

12:12Madison remembers, he explained, that because the sex had started consensually and Madison never verbally withdrew consent, he would not prosecute what had happened as rape. Madison thought that didn't seem right. She says his hands had been around her throat and she couldn't speak. Like, I read more on consent and I always knew that you don't do something without somebody's permission. But I never really thought about that in the sense of sex and my, like, my permission of something, somebody to do something with me. And I'm not saying that I haven't been educated on it. It's just, I guess my brain didn't make that connection.

12:52So I read more on consent and what rape is and what it isn't. And I knew.

13:03But without the county attorney prosecuting, Madison's case couldn't go anywhere. So they left. We actually all had to drive separately because my dad had to go to work and I had school. So we were all in separate cars, actually. And I was on my way back home and I said, well, that's that, I guess. He got away with it. That sucks. and I was already in therapy at this point. My mom had me in therapy by... It was on Valentine's Day. I had my first therapy appointment. So I was like, I'll just continue with therapy and see what happens.

13:47I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

13:55We'll be right back.

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15:0818 plus terms apply. How is Madison doing in the weeks after the assault? Madison was, the thing that I remember being really concerned about with her is that she seemed numb. That she would tell her story and it was almost like it was on autopilot and there weren't any emotions involved. And that worried me. Madison tried to go back to school, but she couldn't sleep in the dorm anymore. And so she moved back in with her parents. A few days later, she had her first panic attack. Madison's mother, Mandy, kept thinking about what the county prosecutor told them. I knew he was so terribly wrong. She went back to his office.

15:56She wanted to talk through the results of Madison's rape kit and her written statement. But the county attorney said the same thing, that he wouldn't bring a rape charge. Bethany College did its own investigation under Title IX. Title IX is a federal civil rights law that was signed by President Nixon in 1972. It prohibits discrimination at schools and colleges based on sex, including sexual harassment and sexual violence. Bethany College found Jared Stolzenberg in violation of its sexual misconduct policy and complaint resolution procedures. He was suspended and later expelled. Was the county attorney's response to Madison unusual?

16:45Oh, sadly, no. Justin Boardman is a retired detective and advised Madison and her family on her case. He spent seven years working in a special victims unit in Utah where he would interview victims of rape and domestic violence. But he didn't feel his training had prepared him well. He realized he was approaching victims with the same instincts as he did suspects. And basically my view on these types of crimes changed, and I learned some things that I had been doing my job wrong, and I had created a whole lot more harm. The issue was misreading the way that survivors present to law enforcement when something traumatic happens to them.

17:43And I was misinterpreting it because I was trained when it came to interviewing suspects. You kind of get those hinky feelings and you start hearing what they're telling you and it doesn't make any sense and they can't get their stories straight. But our victims were doing the same thing. A number of studies have shown that it's normal for victims of sexual assault to act unemotional after they're attacked. They might even forget the details of what happened. They might be able to laugh and joke around. But we weren't trained to see that. We didn't know what we didn't know. He says victims of rape also don't always act the way law enforcement expects them to during an attack.

18:29I mean, you can take Madison's case, for instance, right? When the assault started, his hands went around her throat and she went into what we call tonic immobility or collapsed immobility. And we all in most society would go, you know, if that happened to me, I'd fight back. I would kick, I would scratch, I would do X, Y, Z. In all reality, over 50 % of survivors don't fight back. And so it's very counterintuitive to prosecutors, to law enforcement, even to survivors themselves. Because the guilt that, you know, I was taught that I should scream or fight back, and they can't control that part of the brain.

19:28And it brings a lot of guilt. Justin Boardman left law enforcement. He started to run trainings for other police officers on how to better understand people who report sexual assault and violence. But most people never go to the police in cases of rape, and most rape cases don't end with a conviction. In the United States, it's less than 1%. One study funded by the National Institute of Justice analyzed thousands of rape cases across the country to figure out why they weren't resolved through a jury trial. The principal investigator of the study said, quote, A lot of times, detectives felt like they had really good, solid cases with enough evidence to make an arrest, but prosecutors declined to go forward.

20:24The study found cases where prosecutors declined moving forward based on their own sense of a victim's credibility. It found that some prosecutors thought a jury was less likely to convict if alcohol or other, quote, risky behaviors were involved. Prosecutors also seem less likely to pursue so-called he said, she said cases. So the law, that's why they call it an art form, because there's no hard boundaries when it comes to filing a case. I believe that, you know, a local prosecutor is one of the most powerful people in the United States. The county attorney in Madison's case told the Associated Press that sex crimes are, quote, extremely challenging to prosecute because the jury looks for, quote, that CSI type of evidence.

21:24In September 2019, over a year after Madison first met with the county attorney, she learned that he had decided to charge Jared Stolzenberg with aggravated battery for strangling her. He told the Washington Post, quote, Charging decisions were made based on the evidence that was available in the case. I don't believe that we minimize this. Jared Stolzenberg pleaded guilty. He received two years probation. We reached out to Jared Stolzenberg for this episode, and he told us, quote, I want to start off by saying that I genuinely wish Madison and her family well, and I'm extremely sincerely sorry for all negative and harmful instances I have caused her and her family.

22:13He went on to say, quote, Not all the information she has shared is true, but instead it has been exaggerated. At the sentencing hearing, Madison said she felt grateful for some sort of conviction, but she told the judge, quote, I feel angry that he was not charged for the sexual side of this. Madison and her family weren't ready to let it go. A few months before, Madison's mother had heard Justin Boardman on a podcast. I sent Justin Boardman a quick Facebook message after hearing him. I didn't ask him really any questions. I just told him that he had made me feel like I wasn't crazy for feeling the way I felt over the last several months.

23:03Mandy and Justin eventually met in person, and he started to help Madison and her family think about other ways she could have a chance to present a rape charge to a jury. Then they came across an old law in Kansas. From like the 1800s, but it's still on the books and it looks like some people have tried to use it a few times. The law says that a Kansas citizen can convene their own grand jury. The grand jury law in Kansas states that you can petition to have evidence heard in a case and let a jury of your peers decide if there is enough evidence to bring charges forward. And it is kind of a backdoor through the justice system and a way around the prosecutor.

23:56The law was used during Prohibition by people who wanted to investigate bars that kept serving liquor, while state officials seemed to look the other way. In the last few decades, it's also been used by anti-abortion activists to go after clinics. Kansas is one of only six states where citizens can petition to do this, as long as they collect a certain number of signatures. Basically, there's a mathematical equation. Something like 2 % of the registered voters who voted in the last gubernatorial race in Kansas, plus 100. Which means Madison would need signatures from 329 registered voters to convene a grand jury.

24:42I was scared because having to tell over 300 strangers because I needed their support about what happened to me seemed so scary. While Madison thought about whether she wanted to use the old law, she said she heard about another woman in town. She said she'd also been raped and had also wanted to take her case to trial, but said that she'd heard the same thing from the county attorney. So at that point, I was like, all right, let's collect these signatures. Let's do this. Madison and her family made a plan. So we set up in front of a hair salon in Lindsberg. And to make things harder for us, it was in the middle of COVID.

25:23It was 2020. So we hosted a BYOP, Bring Your Own Pen event. But we also had pens, and we're sanitizing them in between everything and wearing masks in the whole nine yards and made ridiculous signs. And we had a ladder that stood up and had balloons all over it and streamers. Just something to attract people's attention really is what it is. Some of the people who walked by knew Madison and her family. But a lot of people didn't know anything at all. The streamers and balloons worked to get people to stop. And I'd say, hi, my name is Madison Smith. I was raped at Bethany College campus, and the county attorney said, and they said, say no more.

26:10Where do I sign? Like, that was so encouraging and just so amazing to have complete strangers just support you at, I don't know, what was that, 10 words, 15 words I said, and they're like, say no more. a lot of people would disclose incidents that they had been through to us which caught me by surprise I don't know that I expected to become that soft landing spot for people but I was more than happy to do that a few people were kind of rude about it

26:51usually men They would be a little bit defensive. I do specifically remember one woman telling me, if you weren't snatched by somebody that you don't know, then it wasn't right.

27:09Madison and her family stood outside the hair salon for six hours, telling people what had happened. I don't want to say it got easier, but I became numb. Like, I almost became a robot at that point. Like, hi, my name is Madison, and this is what happened to me. Will you please sign my petition so I can get this? That's kind of how it felt like it went for a little while. Madison says they collected just under 200 signatures that day. They still needed over 100 more. And over the next few days, if Madison or her family heard of anyone who was willing to sign, they would go to meet them, wherever they were.

27:50So we were driving all over our county, all over this county, to get people to sign up for us. Eventually, they got the full 329, and they sent their petition to the district for review. But just a few weeks later, they learned it was rejected. It was so defeating to know that we worked so hard to collect over 300 signatures of registered voters in our county, and it got denied. It was so defeating because I was like, we did all that work for nothing. Nothing. It was awful. The petition was denied because they'd missed one detail. because I didn't sign every single sheet of the petition. Just a technicality?

28:45Absolute technicality. So what did that mean? It meant we had to start all over again. There were, I mean, multiple times throughout all of this, there were multiple times where I was just, I'm ready to be done, I'm ready to be human again and not feel like I am a rape survivor and that was my personality. Because at some points, that is what it felt like.