Natasha Aleksenko was raped in Manhattan. How she fought for justice
'07.04.2018'
Source: The Daily Mail
When Natasha Aleksenko was only 20 years old, a man attacked her in the center of New York. Putting a gun to her back and threatening to “release her brains” if the girl screamed, he raped Natasha. After the injury, she returned home and started drinking. Life threatened to go downhill, her statement lay dead weight in the police ...
It happened in Manhattan, on the stairs in the house where Natasha lived, tells The Daily Mail. Although she told the police and underwent a medical examination, the samples collected and the results were not studied for almost 10 years.
As 45-year-old Natasha admitted, she felt “relieved” when she suddenly received a call from the prosecutor's office and informed that the authorities had finally taken over her case. But then the woman began to ask questions - why go through painful examinations with penetration, experience a lot of unpleasant sensations, both physical and psychological, if no one needs the results for years?
A Canadian-born New Yorker resides in the United States to study filmmaking. Soon after the rape, she left the city and returned home, where she began to drink, in order to drown out the incredible spiritual pain she could not cope with.
“I was terribly worried. She blamed herself for not being able to help catch this man, who is still there and, quite possibly, hurting other people, ”the woman admitted.
In 2007, evidence from DNA data coincided with one of the suspects, and in 2008, her rapist, Victor Rondon, was found guilty of eight violent assault points, including burglary, robbery, two rape cases, sodomy, and sexual violence. He is now serving a sentence that can be extended from 44 to 107 years.
“I was just grateful that he was put in jail,” says Natasha.
Natasha recalls how a confrontation with Viktor failed: she simply fainted after seeing her rapist during the trial. According to the woman, her body "turned off, as if I was again at the scene of a crime."
Natasha's samples were one of hundreds of thousands of kits that remained untested and could identify or exclude a suspect. Therefore, in 2011, Natasha - by then not Aleksenko, but Simon, founded the Natasha Justice project, a non-profit organization that aims to combat delays in the processing of test results after rape, and to introduce a method of compulsory examination of each set of samples within 30 days ...
Since 2014, New York City is one of the few US states with a system to handle rape data, but a recent report from the City's Department of Investigation found that the Special Police Victim Group has only 67 detectives working on 5600 cases. sexual crimes. Study USA Today in the 2015 year, it showed that at least 70 000 unprocessed kits with samples obtained after rape are currently stored in the USA.
Natasha wrote the book “A Survival Journey: From Victim to a Lawyer,” in which she described the attack and her experience of trying to achieve justice. She hopes the candid memoir will help other victims of violence return to life.
Last June, the premiere of the documentary "Sex Crimes Unit ”, filmed by HBO, the main character of which was Natasha Aleksenko, who told her story to the whole world.
