Like all of us, Marnie deserved to be safe and protected at her job. But she wasn’t. When she was attacked her employer decided to blame her.
Luckily for us, they put it in writing.
A man raped Marnie while she was working at Adult Shop Direct in February of 2017. She is one of multiple women who told me about their experiences after a woman was raped, robbed and kidnapped at Totally Adults a few weeks ago.
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because I outed them recently for their response after a male raped a female employee there this month.
Two days after Marnie was raped, a group of women gang-bashed her as they stole from the store. She’d returned to work because she had no choice.
At this point, her employers could have supported Marnie. Instead they wrote a disturbing and victim-blaming email to Workcover, saying she failed to follow processes, she ‘made poor choices’, she ‘put herself into vulnerable positions’, she was bad at her job and so on.
When she spoke about what happened on her socials, Marnie was threatened with legal action.
This is not unusual – when scores of former and current employees spoke about the woman raped at Totally Adult this month, they were told they would be sued if they did not remove the posts.
The man who raped Marnie is Mohammad Rafiq. He was convicted and sentenced on three charges of rape and sexual assault. When he was convicted, Marnie was told he would be held in immigration detention indefinitely. He has now been released because he cannot be detained if there are unrealistic prospects of deportation under Australian law.
Marnie lives with the ongoing trauma and life-long repercussions of the rape and the assault. Healing is not linear and never complete, but her journey through this hell would have been made so much easier had her employers treated her with dignity. This is her victim impact statement.
Marnie asked me to share her poem with you:
“Things that day bleed into one
“One second one decision by someone
“He walked in clothed in entitlement because her job description was an unauthorised drug prescription, he took that script but only she overdosed, on the operating table frozen from a human anesthetiser his hands like needles and blades digging in.
“Deeper she fades.
“His face breath and shadow the new replacement of dreams sleeping in and out of memory. “She did not die but lives six feet under, the part of her who was alive with joy, love and opportunity replaced buried by blame, fear, anger, resentment,
sadness and loneliness. For she is the walking embodiment of someone else’s choice. The “Thief, The monster, The selfish and the permanent scar.”
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