As a teenager, Anna Giaritelli sat in high school gym class as girls were pulled aside and told a chilling statistic: One in three women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime. Giaritelli remembers thinking, That won’t be me.
Years later, that belief was shattered. Giaritelli, now the Homeland Security reporter for the Washington Examiner, survived sexual assault at age 30 in Washington, D.C., in broad daylight. Her new book, “Under Assault: A Crime Reporter’s True Story of Overcoming Sexual Trauma and Exposing Injustice,” tells the full story of what happened to her and how she believes the criminal justice system failed her.
“You can do everything right and still be assaulted,” Giaritelli told the Washington Examiner. “Isn’t that the more terrifying reality, that you can try to make the best decisions as a woman and you’re not guaranteed safety?”
In 2020, on a Saturday morning around 9:45 a.m., on a routine trip to the post office near her Capitol Hill apartment, Giaritelli was sexually assaulted on the street by a stranger. She had done everything women are taught to do — she was out in daylight, in a public place, dressed modestly, bothering no one. It didn’t matter.
Police collected DNA from her clothing, and months later, they got a match. Her attacker had already been in the system. He was arrested, but the sense of justice was short-lived. A judge released him the next day, citing overcrowding at the D.C. jail.
“The judge chose to release him the next day because the D.C. jail was overcrowded,” Giaritelli said. “In the next year and a half, he was arrested five more times for additional crimes and released the next day. To me, it felt like D.C. wasn’t doing enough to keep me safe, or anyone else in the city safe.”
When Giaritelli flew back to D.C. from Texas, where she had relocated for safety, to testify before a grand jury, she encountered yet another barrier. Giaritelli was told she could not testify in the same room as the grand jurors because of COVID-19 concerns.
“I would have to sit in a room directly next to the grand jury and speak into a camera,” Giaritelli said. “The irony was that the prosecutor in my case had just sat across the table from me for about an hour speaking with me about my case and what the grand jury would entail. She then went into the room to the grand jury and spoke with them. And so it was another way that I felt the criminal justice system wasn’t making sense. Another way that I felt slighted by the system.”
The pandemic didn’t just distort courtroom procedures; it warped Giaritelli’s recovery.
“Someone’s ability to overcome trauma is largely affected by whether they have people physically present around them,” she said. “In the two weeks after that trauma, I had no one. My recovery was significantly impacted early on by COVID.”
Giaritelli first spoke out in an op-ed in the Washington Examiner. Since then, she has shared her story with the White House, testified on Capitol Hill, and now put it all into a book, the success of which she measures in deeply personal terms.
A MAN WENT TO PRISON FOR ASSAULTING ME. DC POLICE CRIME STATS SHOW HE WAS NEVER ARRESTED
“What would make this book a success?” Giaritelli pondered aloud. “It would really be a success if one woman read this book and said ‘Because of how detailed you shared your story, I knew the signs to look forward to avoid being sexually harassed at work or assaulted by someone in this type of situation, and I was able to avoid that.’”
“Under Assault: A Crime Reporter’s True Story of Overcoming Sexual Trauma and Exposing Injustice” is currently available for pre-order on Amazon, and you can read Giaritelli’s op-ed here.
