Day 1: The First Trial of Jesse Matthew
June 8, 2015
Fairfax, Virginia
Collisions
Thirty-five years ago, my father was driving from Smithfield, North Carolina, to Raleigh, in a terrible thick unusual winter fog enveloping the highway. He had slowed to 45 mph, but an 18-wheeler in front of him was much slower, and my father's car smashed into the rear of the huge truck. Somehow, the impact broke his driver's seat, and my father was cast immediately backward into a flat position, as though he were on a stretcher. The top of his car, as his car slid and lodged under the truck, was sheered off. When a rescue machine lifted the back of the 18-wheeler, my father walked out unharmed.
In the Fairfax courtroom today, at three minutes before 5 p.m., the survivor of the 2005 sexual marauder was excused from the stand, and she walked out of the courtroom unharmed.
Collisions screeched in that room all day.
Some of the collisions were silent, internal: Dan Harrington seeing Jesse Matthew for the first time. Dan and Gil seeing the victim, RG, for the first time, who has flown from India to testify, bravely, a decade after her assault.
One little crash was proximal. Separated by twelve inches, Gil Harrington and Jesse Matthew's mother, for the first time, made eye contact. Gil nodded, and the mother of the accused said "hello."
Other collisions hissed and clattered like oil fires and pan lids. These impacts were procedural: a photograph shown of RG's bloodied clothes; the admission that she had been a virgin, and that, until today, she had been too ashamed to say that yes, after his hand had penetrated her, so did his penis.
I believe that the three most jarring collisions in the courtroom have left many of us, though we watched from a distance today, aching.
1. The Defense attempted to counter the irrefutable fact that RG scratched the attacker and had his DNA under her fingernail with the hocus pocus possibility that it was just "touch DNA." Maybe Jesse and RG had just happened to pick up, for example, the same bag of potato chips that day, and an infinitesimal little DNA strand from Jesse Matthew leapt like an eager cricket from the chips to lodge right under RG's fingernail. That gymnast DNA, wow, was just coincidentally in the microscopic mood to do a Cirque du Soleil move.
This is the collision of beyond a reasonable doubt with fantasy.
2. The details of RG's assault were exposed for the first time, and none of us who care to invest in the work of Help Save the Next Girl can ever be prepared for the actual cinematic description of a sexual predator's attack. The man who attacked her picked her up as one would pick up an infant. He threw her onto the curb. He beat and beat and bloodied her. He strangled her. He was as violent as a man in a fight for his life, and as vicious and frenzied as the wildest things in our worst nightmares. She was covered in blood and nearly dead. This is the collision of coolly knowing a phrase, such as "attempted capital murder," and being viscerally empathetically sickened.
3. Dan and Gil Harrington sat through RG's testimony, hearing about this rampage of a furious predator. Jesse Matthew's parents heard the same story. Both sets of parents were approximately equidistant from the small, articulate woman testifying about what she survived and remembered well, and how she helped police know his face. This is the collision of the past and the present; of what we must know and what we must do.
Thanks to all of you who support the victims, their families, and this great and positive movement to refuse silence or non-participation and instead to steadfastly commit to Help Save the Next Girl.
In this thundering Season of Justice, we are all so grateful for your dignity, kindness, and love.
Jane Lillian Vance
Vice President, Help Save the Next Girl
and Morgan Harrington's professor in the last Spring of her life