As reports of military sexual assaults grow, Senate does nothing
Protect Our Defenders Advocacy Committee Member Brian Lewis is featured in this article from the Dallas Morning News:
And we heard from Brian Lewis, who was stationed outside of Guam 14 years ago when a senior petty officer invited him to dinner and then raped him at knifepoint. After Lewis reported the attack, he was told to leave it alone and was sent back out to sea.
I even know someone who resigned over the way sexual assaults were handled at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. Denise Rucker Krepp was an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, continuing her family’s 200-year-old family tradition. But when she requested an investigation into sexual assaults in 2011 in her role as chief counsel at the Maritime Administration, she was told by a Cabinet secretary that she shouldn’t have done that and was asked to resign.
The sexual assaults and the way they were handled were “appalling,” she said in congressional testimony this year. Her family’s military tradition will end with her, she testified.
