Tracy remembered waking up with someone pouring alcohol down her throat.
She said her clothes were strewn around the room, she was assaulted with a flashlight, and with their fingers, and someone put ice on her groin.
Tracy told investigators that she woke up at another point and found Ainsworth on top of her, having sex with her.
The others, she said, were standing around the room, cheering. " Ainsworth told police he took Tracy's clothes off and had consensual sex with her.
She said she was gang raped, sodomized, robbed, and then, re-victimized -- her word -- when a college football coach suspended two of the players for one game and was quoted as saying his players had made, "a bad choice." That phrase burns her, still.
All these years later, it sends her hurtling back to the rape examination at Salem Hospital, the police interview, having to tell her boyfriend and mother, and the whispers, guilt and shame.
Janay Palmer had her chin down, shoulder raised, and she was half-turned away from Rice in the instant before the Ravens' running back punched her out. But that dissolved into an alleged gang rape and sex assault after which four men would be arrested, handcuffed and booked.
For years, she's been hung up on that three-word hook -- "a bad choice" -- as if violating her body was like knocking on the wrong door in the right neighborhood. She'd told investigators the men stood around, watching it happen and cheering the others on. "I get sick of reading articles about how great a guy the coach is." That coach is Mike Riley. Tracy's report to police and the ensuing investigation led newscasts, raised questions and divided public sentiment when it occurred 16 years ago.
At one point, she said she begged one of the men to make it stop. She has never before been identified as the victim and has never before talked publicly about it. • • • Brenda Tracy worked in Keizer as a waitress at Bray's Family Restaurant in 1998.
She emailed me a few days earlier, up late one night, unable to sleep.
In a chilling account, she detailed how she reported to police that she was sexually assaulted in 1998 by four men, three of them college football players.