For many years, I supported what I considered my "real" journalism by writing for the better paying women's magazines and it was in the midst of working on a story for one of those women's magazines that I stumbled on this story. I was calling around to some attorneys in Texas who represented women in sexual harassment cases and one of the lawyers said, "Have I got a case for you!" He went on to tell me about a woman who was working as a paramedic for defense contractor KBR in Iraq when she was brutally gang-raped a few weeks earlier.
The woman, Dawn Leamon, was back in the U.S. for a brief furlough, and had reached out to that attorney for help. She was coming in to talk to him in person that week, he said, and he'd see if she'd be open to talking with a reporter.
I knew I had to get down to Houston to do this interview and turned to my go-to, best editors Betsy Reed at the Nation and Esther Kaplan at the Investigative Fund at the Nation. They were off-site at a conference somewhere but took my call and immediately agreed to fund my travel to Texas and cover costs for investigating this story.
Shortly thereafter, I delivered my article, "Another KBR Rape," which was published in The Nation--and a very fearful Dawn Leamon got the attention she hoped would protect her from further retaliations.
For me, this was a perfect example of what the alternative press does best: cover the important stories that others don't and by doing that, push mainstream media coverage. I think of it as a trickle-up effect. Within a week, the AP picked up the story then NBC then ABC--and suddenly everyone was covering it. Within days, I was writing about how the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened a hearing to demand that the Justice Department explain why it has failed to prosecute a single sexual assault case in the theater since the Iraq War began.
And by 2010, I was able to write a story about one of the KBR rape survivors finally getting her day in court.
Read the original article here.
