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How “48 Hours” handled female-on-female rape in “Kristen’s Secret”

Last week, I tuned in for my weekly dose of 48 Hours. True crime can be gritty, violent, and uncomfortable-but sometimes you catch an episode and the case just sticks with you, because it matters. You feel for someone, you relate to their hurt, you wonder if and when justice will be properly served-you become invested. We’re human. We have to invest ourselves in tough situations, at least I do.

“Kristen’s Secret” isn’t going to be easy. Some subjects, some moments in our life are tucked away for years, too difficult to discuss or make sense of. Such was the case for Kristen Cunnane, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. It was 1996 and she’d just gotten her braces off-she was in middle school. A science teacher named Mr. Witters, who’d been having inappropriate encounters with several of his students, lured Kristen into his classroom after class. She says, “Then something happened.” But erased that memory for good. This is how she fell into the next terrible trap, under the misguided net of a favorite P.E. and sports coach among the students, Coach Julie Correa.

 

Like so many of us who had favorite teachers and coaches in school, she thought nothing of their friendship-in fact, Kristen and her friends would often hang in Correa’s office in the girls’ locker room during lunch and after school. Kristen confided in her about what had happened with the Mr. Witter. In retrospect, she believes this is the event that made Correa feel she could isolate Kristen, because Kristen, lost and traumatized by the incident, had no intentions of telling on the teacher. Meanwhile, what Kristen’s parents knew was that she was spending a lot of new time with this coach, and they felt like coaches who pick favorites only upset the other girls, Kristen’s friends. Kristen’s mom even confronted Correa at one point to basically warn her of this, and Correa agreed completely, saying, “I totally see where you’re coming from and I totally respect that.”

It should have been that simple. But Correa, a married woman in her 20s, began to close in on Kristen even more. She decided to test the waters and kiss Kristen on a car ride home-and Kristen didn’t tell anyone. When Correa decided to rent out an apartment to be closer to the school, she invited Kristen and some other girls over to check it out (before her husband moved in with her). For whatever reason, Kristen went along, and when Correa instructed the other girls to go wait downstairs, she began to molest a very afraid and confused Kristen. The abuse continued to spiral out of control. Correa took Kristen’s virginity, who believed it was even possible she might get pregnant as a result. Kristen explains to the interviewer that she was very sheltered, so the trauma of these acts of abuse were only that much more horrific.

The interviewer nods her head and says, “Heartbreaking…” And then, very carefully asks Kristen to explain what kinds of things were done to her, “without going into too much detail.” This moment strikes me, because I watch a TON of true crime television and I’ve never once heard the interviewer instruct a survivor to filter their account of what happened-whether this particular moment was handled out of respect, empathy, or the stigma of female-to-female rape is left up in the air for you to decide.

 

But imagine this-a young girl, who hasn’t even made it through middle school, has now been sexually assaulted by not one, but two of her teachers-people that are supposed to be doing one job-educating, and yet took their relationships to the farthest of outer-bounds. To trigger all those unanswered questions and emotions, Kristen then learned that the science teacher, Mr. Witter, had driven his car off the Pacific Coast Highway and killed himself. Correa used Mr. Witter’s death to only manipulate Kristen further, saying such things like, “I’m going to have to do what Mr. Witters did.” By now, Kristen was in high school and Correa was the master of all plans, often telling Kristen how to sneak out, forcing her to have sex afterhours at the middle school, providing her with a cell phone she could hide in a Spanish-English dictionary she had cut pages out of. In between breaks, 48 Hour asks the viewers if we understand why Kristen didn’t tell anyone about the abuse. Do we understand? We weren’t there; it’s that simple. “Did she cry?” “Did she say no?” “Did she just ‘go along with it’?” We can speculate, but we don’t know.

Fast-forward to 2010, Kristen is now having vivid flashbacks back to the time when she was repeatedly raped by her P.E. coach. She’s in a relationship, she’s successful, but there’s this one thing she’s never done: Get justice for what happened to her. She needed to tell the world that during a three-year period, she was raped from 400-500 times by someone she was supposed to trust, and she was just a kid. Rape culture is normalized and minimized down to a narrow aspect; sometimes it’s scrutinized based on our binary attitudes about gender and sexuality. This is not a case about gender; it’s not about a young girl who overdramatized an embarrassing encounter she allowed to happen because she didn’t know any better.

It was from the support of Kristen’s high school boyfriend Scott who she met in her senior year and is still with today, that she eventually decided to report Correa’s crime to the police. It had been nearly a decade since Kristen confronted her on the night after her 18th birthday, telling her to stay away from her for good. While it’s rare to see female teachers abusing their female students, we’re learning more and more about women in this dynamic, and that for women perpetrators, sex isn’t necessarily the motivating factor, rather, it’s their warped idea of love. Kristen had evidence of this to show police-a love note Correa had written her where she called Kristen her “little angel” and promised to “be hers” always.

With the investigation underway, detectives had Kristen do the unthinkable-call Correa and actually pretend to have feelings for her, after all this time. On the recorded phone conversation, Kristen feeds her former coach lines, and Correa takes the bait, saying, “I just want you to know that I’d do it all over again.” On one hand, she couldn’t resist this blast from her past, as if she was reconnecting with an old flame who she’d never fully let go of-telling Kristen she may not be able to resist touching her if she saw her again, sharing, “I remember everything,” and saying so with a fondness, as if Kristen might be strolling down the same lane. She’d convinced herself that this was a legitimate relationship, perhaps only punishable by the fact that she was her teacher, but certainly not her rapist.

By now, Julie Correa had two children and lived with her husband in Salt Lake City. When investigators finally confronted Correa, she sat in an interrogation room, handcuffed in sneakers and workout attire, telling them Kristen “manipulated the heck out of me.” She offers that Kristen would threaten to hurt herself when Correa tried to shut down their communication. She paints herself as a married woman who has a husband to go home to, certainly not an adolescent girl’s home to stake out and wait in for hours until Kristen’s parents go to sleep, so she can have her way. You’d think if she did believe so intently that this relationship was perhaps platonic (as evidence in her recorded conversation with Kristen), that she wouldn’t put the blame on Kristen. But she did. What she didn’t say was that Kristen wanted it as much as she did-but that Kristen was the chief operator in making this happen. If we may connect the dots, all these lies seem to add up to one thing: Denial of her very real and very irresponsible crimes. The interrogation goes on, she’s shown the love note she once penned-so tripped up at the sight of this letter that she jumps the gun and says she didn’t do what she’s being accused of, even though she hasn’t been accused yet.

As if this story can’t get any worse, when investigators took a deeper look at Kristen’s middle school administration, they discovered Julie Correa had reported Mr. Witters all those years ago to the school, perhaps to see how they would handle it-which as we know, they didn’t. Was this the enticement she gave herself to pursue Kristen, knowing the administration may never take any allegations seriously? In the end, she was arrested on 28 counts of abuse and accepted a plea bargain after learning she could face over a hundred years in prison-no contest to four felony counts, one being rape. She is now carrying out an eight-year sentence.

As for Kristen, she’s a three-time All-American swimmer and is the Associate Head Coach of the women’s swimming team at University of California, Berkeley, a place where her Cal Bears army looks up to her in all the ways she once hoped to look up to coaches.

For more info on Kristen’s case, you can watch the episode here.

 

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