“Senator Martha McSally’s Revelation of Assault May Reopen Debate”, The New York Times

By Jennifer Steinhauer and Richard A. Oppel Jr., 7 March 2019

WASHINGTON — A Republican senator’s revelation of her sexual assault while serving in the Air Force is likely to renew debate over how to best get justice for victims, an issue that seemed settled several years ago when Congress adjusted conduct codes that dictate military justice.

Long before the #MeToo movement brought sexual violence and harassment to the fore, women in the military and their advocates had highlighted such misconduct in the armed forces. In 2005, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and at the time a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, questioned a top Army official about the issue, and he dismissed her with annoyance.

In the intervening years, Congress has sought to address the matter, which leaves a large number of veterans — women and men alike — in despair long afterward.

But it stopped short of a plan championed in 2013 by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, that would have taken sexual assault cases outside the military chain of command. Military prosecutors, rather than accusers’ commanders, would have the power to decide which cases to try.

Many lawmakers, including Senator Martha McSally, Republican of Arizona, who spoke candidly on Wednesday about her rape before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, would like Congress to take another look at the issue.

“This problem doesn’t seem to be getting better,” Ms. Collins said. “So maybe we need to try another approach.”

A Pentagon report for the 2017 fiscal year found that the Defense Department received 6,769 reports of sexual assault involving service members as either victims or subjects of criminal investigation, a nearly 10 percent increase over the previous year. That could suggest that more people are reporting their assaults, the goal of the earlier legislation.

In the past few years, women who have run for office have increasingly learned that revealing past traumas is not the political liability that many have perceived. Many have spoken openly during their campaigns about their assaults, abortions, domestic abuse and family tragedies, finding it as a way to connect with others who have suffered similar experiences. “She comforted and inspired millions,” said Representative Ayanna S. Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has long shared her own history of assault.

Ms. McSally’s revelations were carefully planned. At a meeting a week ago on Capitol Hill, she stunned several military victims’ rights advocates who had come to discuss military justice overhaul when she disclosed her assault.

“She said, ‘I’m a survivor of military sexual trauma,’” said Stacey Thompson, who was sexually assaulted in the Marines and later founded #MetooMilitary, a victims’ rights group. “And she said she was just appalled at the way it was received” when she finally confided it to people inside the military, Ms. Thompson said.

Noting that Ms. McSally retired as a colonel and was one of the most well-known officers in the Air Force as the branch’s first female pilot to fly in combat, Ms. Thompson added: “If it happens at that level, imagine how often it happens at the E-1, E-2 or E-3 level,” referring to the lowest enlisted ranks. “If they didn’t take her seriously, and they did not do anything about it at her level, why would we think they would have done anything about it at lower-ranking levels?”

Ms. Thompson said she and several others in the meeting did not press for details: “As a survivor, I don’t think anyone in the room felt the need to ask more.”

Don Christensen, a retired colonel who served as a prosecutor, defense counsel and military judge in the Air Force for 23 years, said that word of Ms. McSally’s rape never circulated among the Air Force’s military justice community.

The Air Force tries very hard to stifle accusations against senior officers, and if the accusation was never disclosed outside Ms. McSally’s chain of command, then it could have easily been suppressed, said Mr. Christensen, who served as the Air Force’s chief prosecutor from 2010 to 2014 but left the military after an Air Force general threw out a conviction he had won against a pilot over sexual assault.

Had the accusation ever been shared with members of the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps — the lawyers who serve as legal advisers, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges — it would have been difficult to stamp out, given her prominence at the time and given how small the corps was, said Mr. Christensen, who is now the president of Protect Our Defenders, a military victims’ rights group.

“Everybody knew who McSally was,” he said. “She’s kind of an icon in the military. I just don’t think it ever got to the legal world.”