“What Do We Owe Her Now?” (Washington Post, 2018, 9,475 words)

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I read this quite a while ago, and it stuck with me so much so that I read it again. It is devastating, by the way, in case anybody didn't land on this one.

Elizabeth Bruenig's five part multimedia feature for the Washington Post profiles a woman named Amber Wyatt who reported her rape by two popular boys in high school and was subsequently ridiculed by her hometown and denied her day in court by the authorities. Bruenig went to school with Wyatt but did not know her well. I remember being reminded of Sharp Objects, the Gillian Flynn novel, where the main character is asked to return to her hometown to report on a series of missing and murdered young women, and I was even more jarred reading this considering this was a real woman's life completely ruined by people who didn't believe her. Bruenig admits to, just like her classmates, forming an opinion on the situation without even having the slightest inkling of what happened. Wyatt's life seems to have changed for the better since her entire hometown sort of set out to ruin her life in favor of two soccer players on the verge of college scholarships or something. Sounds pretty much like today. "We can't believe this one woman because it would change the image we refuse to let go of, and her suffering does not matter, and also she is a liar!" But! I digress.

This piece was published in 2018 concerning events which transpired in 2006. I love everything about the way this is formatted. It's not a casual read. It includes a number of videos and audio packages that bring each of the five parts of this story and its epilogue together. It's already almost 10,000 words, but bringing in all of these supplementary materials completes the entire thing. It brings one more devastating punch each time. It absolutely requires you to stop scrolling and take it in, and it drives home the message that Amber Wyatt was wronged, and no one exactly knows what to do with that information 12 years after the fact, least of all the reporter who didn't know the girl in the first place. The seamlessness with which these elements are integrated into this reporting is something worth stealing, but I don't know if anything will give me the genuine personal sadness that this piece makes me feel with each of these elements.

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