Dear President-Elect Trump:
Approximately fifteen years ago I had a conversation on an airplane that I’ve never forgotten. I was sitting next to a woman who had been married for about twenty years but had divorced in the year or two previous to our conversation.
It was a long flight, and we had an opportunity to visit. She learned that I was a prosecuting attorney at the time, and she opened her heart and disclosed some very private facts about her life.
She confided in me that she had been raped as a young woman. She described how it devastated her emotionally and wounded her physically and that it took her years to come to terms with what had happened to her.
Then she told me of her marriage. She and her husband had several children—three to five if my memory is correct. She described many happy years together. But the happiness didn’t last. He cheated; had an affair with another woman. It was consensual sex between two adults—her husband and the other woman. What she told me next has stuck with me.
“I was raped as a young woman, and my husband had an affair with another woman. I would rather be raped a dozen times than have to experience the wrenching pain of marital infidelity. Being raped was devastating. But it was so much less painful than the adultery. And the rape just affected me. My husband’s adultery not only ruined my life, but it also ruined my children’s lives.”
A few months later I was sitting at my desk when the police came in to review a domestic violence case. Something about the facts, as represented, didn’t add up and they wanted to visit with me about it. I happened to know both parties to the incident—the husband and wife. The photos the police took of her demonstrated an attack—she had black eyes and puffy lips. She had been beaten. But her account didn’t add up.
I had the police bring her to my office. Maybe because we knew each other, she was willing to tell the whole story.
“I took a rubber mallet and beat myself with it. I gave myself black eyes and a fat lip. Then I called the police and accused my husband of beating me,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
She didn’t hesitate in her response: “You guys won’t do anything for the scars that he gives me on the inside, so I thought I’d make some on the outside so that someone would help me.”
I understood the feelings of the woman on the plane.
I’ve pondered these two events from the lives of these two women through the years. They generate lots of questions in my mind about the role of government in regulating human conduct and the role of humans in governing themselves.
I’ll discuss this more in depth in my letter tomorrow.
Yours truly,
David O. Leavitt
