A New Jersey woman who suffers from multiple sclerosis says that after she was brutally beaten and gang-raped, local law enforcement allegedly refused to believe her story, accusing her of being a prostitute and drug addict. She also says they asked her, "Did you voluntarily pull down the man’s pants before he raped you?"
According to NBC New York, the woman, identified only as "Kris," fell asleep on a bus on December 5th and woke up in downtown Trenton. When she got off the bus in hopes of finding alternate transportation home, she says she was followed by an unknown assailant, and later woke up on a mattress in an abandoned home.
Kris said she was raped by two men, one of whom repeatedly struck her in the face and broke her jaw; eventually they left, and she left the house looking for help. "Three or four people I first saw, and they wouldn’t give me the time of day," she said. "And then I saw four people across the street and … they told me to go away." A pizza shop owner called 911 for her and she was taken to a hospital near her home, where a rape exam was performed and she was discharged, much to her mother's chagrin. "This wasn’t just a cut on her hand or a sprain of her ankle. She had five fractures of her face,” her mother told NBC.
And there was more to come: Kris claims wasn't even interviewed by a police officer until December 23rd, two and a half weeks after she was raped. In that interview, Kris says she was accused by both a detective and a prosecutor's investigator of being a drug addict and a prostitute, thanks to a Fentanyl pain patch her doctor had prescribed her after she suffered an MS-related injury. “They tag-teamed," Kris told the station. "Was I out there soliciting? Was I out there buying drugs? Why did I get off the bus at that spot?'"
The officers reportedly even asked Kris's mother whether she believed her daughter had MS. "You sure about her MS?' That’s all they kept asking me," said Kris' mother. "'Are you sure she didn’t fall and this isn’t MS?"
Kris, who was forced to undergo multiple jaw surgeries, has no criminal history for drugs or prostitution. Her rape kit's DNA results have not yet been reported to prosecutor’s office, and it took a month for the kit to be sent out for testing in the first place. Both the Trenton police and the Mercer County Prosecutor's office, which are handling her case, deny Kris and her mother's claims of mistreatment, but Kris maintains they treated her brutal rape "like it was a big joke and a waste of time."
