Pride Goeth Before Destruction

I completely lost it. After holding it together for so long, I went crazy with rage. I lunged at her, but the other girls grabbed me before I could get at her and hoisted me off the ground above their heads. Some pulled my arms away from my body, and some grasped me by the ankles and spread my legs as wide as they would go. The tallest girls positioned themselves under my ass and pushed it upward so that my vulva would be as prominently exposed and displayed as possible. This couldn't have been planned. This was the instinctive cruelty of the mob. They carried me right up to the front of the stands and began to slowly parade me all the way around the stadium like a sacrificial offering to the crowd, remaining close to the stands and always keeping my open legs facing them. I had thought that nothing could be more humiliating than dancing naked in front of thousands of people, but this was something else again. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. All that had gone before was, after all, 'just' nudity and with some distance between me and all the observers, but now, with my legs held so widely open, the fans, at least those in the lower rows, could see my hooded clitoris and labia and vagina. After toughing it out this far, I began to sob uncontrollably.

I was ruined. And broken.

Until now all those people had thought that they were watching the relatively harmless antics of some crazy exhibitionist, even if she had been duped into her lonely nudity. This was different. At least some of them could see from my desperate squirming and teary, terror-stricken face that this was forced. And unspeakably vulgar. This was, in fact, sexual assault. Predictably, the men, the immature younger ones anyway, were still roaring their approval and shouting out remarkably lewd comments. But some of the women, and those older men who probably had daughters or granddaughters of their own, began to yell out things like, "Put her down!" It was a distinct minority, though. Most of them were no doubt thinking, "This serves her right. This is exactly what she deserves for putting on such a shameless exhibition. If the little whore wants us to see her naked body, we may as well see all of it." About the time the girls completed a full circuit of the field with me, the game ended, and the players, coaches and other sideline personnel trotted off the field, but not one fan made a move toward the exits. The girls carried me back out to midfield, unceremoniously dumped me on the ground and ran to the sideline where they stood looking at me to see what would happen.

I lay there face up, my legs still splayed, my hands covering my face and my body heaving with sobs. It took me a long time to understand what happened next, just what the hell came over me. I certainly wasn't horny. What I was experiencing was whatever the exact opposite of sexual excitement is. I brought my right hand down between my legs and began to masturbate. Only it was nothing like real masturbation. My vagina was as dry as sandpaper when I painfully forced two fingers of my right hand inside myself. Even when I withdrew my fingers and began furiously rubbing my clitoris, I felt nothing. My nervous system, along with my brain, had shut down. After a few minutes, I ended up convincingly faking an orgasm, throwing my head back, arching my hips skyward and screaming at the top of my lungs.

I read later that on occasion, when someone is humiliated and degraded beyond the breaking point, they finally just snap and can even seek to further their own degradation. Even some rape victims can end up acting out sexually in extremely self-destructive ways. I'm pretty sure that's what happened to me. In fact, when I first saw the videos, I was stunned. I had absolutely no recollection of touching myself like that. I know in my heart that I wasn't seeking sexual gratification. I didn't come close to having a real orgasm. I was simply seeking the ultimate in public humiliation. Think about this: You have just watched videos of yourself, lying on your back naked in the middle of a full football stadium and masturbating frantically. Picture yourself sitting there gaping at those images, learning for the first time that you've done something inconceivably lewd and humiliating. Think that's a memory that's likely to fade with time?

Eventually, some sympathetic fan made his way onto the field, picked me up in his arms and carried me to one of the sidelines. (The fans booed him.) He tried to talk to me, even tried to offer me his shirt, but I didn't respond. When I began to struggle in his arms like a restless cat, he gently put me down, and I shakily ran toward one of the exits, left the stadium and walked the two miles home in the nude. I couldn't have cared less about that. A few times I was accosted by people who demanded to know what was going on with me, but I just gestured at my naked body and said, "This? This is nothing." They'd find out all about it soon enough.

I shouldn't have gone home to my parents' house, anyway. By the time I got there, everything I owned was piled on the front lawn. They had completely disowned me. I had to walk another mile or so before I found a girl who gave me some clothes, drove me back to my house, helped me collect my stuff and put me up for the night. As we were driving back to her house, I realized that this girl, who was being so kind to me, was one of those I had mercilessly body-shamed. I began to cry again.

Anyway, there were certainly repercussions. I heard that I was expelled from school (I wasn't about to go back there to find out). I could have returned the following year, but I really needed to leave the state, so I opted for the GED and moved to California. I got into a decent college and have been working my way through school as a stripper. I didn't want to become a stripper; I only did it for the money for school. It's boring and means nothing to me. Every time I hear a hundred guys howling for more, I think, "This? This is nothing."

I could draw some small measure of satisfaction from the other cheerleaders also getting expelled, especially since, up until that last, ill-advised touch of cruelty, they could have totally gotten away with it. They could have easily denied any prior knowledge of 'my' plans. They could have even told the truth. That they never had any intention of running naked onto the field, that Sarah had done it of her volition. Maybe they had joked around about something like that, but never in a million years would it have occurred to them that one of us could have taken it seriously, especially Sarah. It really was a perfectly conceived and executed prank because it required the victim to willingly, if inadvertently, prank herself. But after having it all play out so successfully, they had gone one giant step too far, and that was their undoing. They were even charged with sexual assault. I was asked to testify against them but refused, not because I didn't want them to suffer, but because I suspected that the trial would be both a grueling personal ordeal and a public spectacle. It was. I had foolishly thought that without my testimony the charges would be dropped, but as the D.A. patiently and pointedly explained to me, this offense was perpetrated in public, and that by the time of the trial, it had probably been witnessed by about 200 million people, some 35,000 of whom were actually present when the crime was committed. I was then subpoenaed as a material witness.

And the trial went exactly as I had feared. The defense had a field day during my cross-examination, asserting that my masturbation proved that I found this whole episode a delicious sexual adventure and that I even put the other girls up to displaying my naked body to the crowd. Hence, no sexual assault. It was all done with my consent. He even tried to make me admit that standing naked and peeing myself in front of everyone was sexually arousing for me.

Ironically, it was the most humiliating aspect of the trial that won the D.A.'s case for her—the videos. Try to imagine sitting in a packed courtroom, filled not only with local spectators but with representatives of media outlets around the world (for some reason the Japanese seemed to have sent every reporter in the country), and then reliving the experience as you watched it on the large-screen TV on the courtroom wall. The D.A. outdid herself. In addition to showing the entire video of me being displayed to the crowd, she had spliced in close-ups of my tear-streaked face shrieking in horror. And if that weren't enough, to further demonstrate the very source of that horror, there were numerous lingering close-ups of my vulva. During the defense, they showed all of the earlier video: my running onto field naked, the pyramids, my 'featured' halftime solo dance and, of course, the faked orgasm, all of which the D.A. had omitted. The D.A. objected on the grounds that those videos were irrelevant to the assault, but the defense attorney claimed that the other footage established my 'mindset' and was crucial in proving that everything was consensual. The judge overruled the D.A. and allowed it all to be shown.

In the end, our video trumped their video, and the girls were convicted. All of them received jail time, but it was only a slap on the wrist. Each of them served less than a year. I've thought about that awful, soul-destroying day ever since and relived it in countless nightmares, constantly haunted by the inevitable 'what-ifs.' What if I had refused to go along with such a dumbass idea in the first place? What if the moment I realized that they had tricked me into running out there naked by myself, I had kept my wits about me, bowing deeply and strolling nonchalantly back to the women's locker room, waving and and blowing kisses to the crowd. I could have owned it. I would have still been expelled from school, but I could have come back the next year as some kind of hero. A school legend instead of the certain recipient of unbearable derision and scorn. What if I hadn't overlooked the strongest clue of all—the suspiciously tepid resistance to Anita's scheme. Most of those girls would have burned up in a house fire before running outside naked. (Except for Anita. She would run naked from Boston to Malibu for a noble enough cause.) What if Ms. Carroll hadn't thought up her special punishment on the fly? But mainly, what if I hadn't lost it and tried to attack Anita so close to the end of my ordeal?

What is so heartbreaking about all this is that if they hadn't assaulted and degraded me, hadn't caused me to have some sort of psychotic break, I think I could have eventually grown up and dealt with everything else. Maybe one day even attended a reunion, after all, and laughed at the old videos of me running naked onto the field and of shaking my naked ass and swinging around my unrestrained breasts at halftime. I could have admitted that I had fallen for an elaborate and deeply humiliating prank. And, when enough years had passed, even watched those videos nostalgically, thinking or musing aloud, "Damn, that girl was hot." But after what those cheerleaders ultimately did to me, none of that could have ever happened.

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