‘I screamed and the world listened’: how astronaut Amanda Nguyen survived rape to fight for other victims
Assaulted at 22, Nguyen was shocked to find she would have to pay for her rape evidence kit – which might be destroyed long before any court case. She talks about her battle for survivors’ rights, and the ambition that is taking her into space
Behind a hospital curtain, under strip lighting, with a specialist nurse and a rape crisis volunteer at her side, Amanda Nguyen lay dazed and bruised. Her body and soul hurt in places she didn’t know could hurt. She felt icy cold but at the same time burning hot – she was, she said, a cold slab of meat while her insides were liquid magma. Yet from her hospital bed, she was expected to process information and make decisions that could change her life.
Just hours earlier, Nguyen, then 22, had been living her dream. “I was a student at Harvard, three months from graduation with the rest of my life in front of me,” she says. Her head was buzzing with two possible futures: her lifelong ambition of becoming an astronaut – astrophysics was her subject and she’d interned at Nasa aged 18 – or a career with the CIA, as a spy. She had been approached by a recruiter and started the process of onboarding. Then, a frat party had ended in rape – one so planned and precise that she is convinced her rapist had done it before – and here she was in the early hours, at a Harvard teaching hospital, her body suddenly a crime scene.
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