Jennifer Thompson
Benefitting Healing Justice
On July 28th, 1984, Jennifer Thompson was asleep when a man broke into her apartment at 3:00am and brutally raped her. Jennifer knew in that moment that if she survived, memorizing his features would be critical in helping to catch and convict her attacker. The straight-A student studied him carefully and was later praised by police after picking him out of a line-up. The only problem? She picked the wrong man. Ronald Cotton spent over a decade in prison for a crime he did not commit. In this episode, Jennifer talks about how memory gets contaminated, why the need to blame someone can create an entirely false narrative, and how turning her pain into purpose has given victims of wrongful conviction a place to find healing and forgiveness.
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Wise Words
“So I made two decisions that night. One is I’m not dying here; and two, if I survive this, I’m going to know who you are and I will watch you rot in hell.”
“But for me, that night, staying there and present and connected to my skin was my only chance of surviving. So I stayed calm and I began to try to pay attention to everything about him that I could, I began to try to memorize the shape of his eyes, the shape of his nose. I was trying to find anything like a scar or a piercing or a tattoo, things that he couldn’t alter later.”
“...And so all of these things, I was trying to imprint in my brain. I was hoping that he would give me some piece of information as to who he was and I knew that the only thing I had was my ability to stay calm and the fact that I had a really good memory, I was a straight A student.”
“Now he was angry at me. He was mad and I knew that once he caught me that I was going to die. So I did the next thing that made sense to me, which was to run towards the light and I took off through the complex. I was heading towards light when I saw a carport light on in someone’s house. I didn’t know who lived there, but I prayed that they were home.”
“I’m thinking to myself, if I don’t get this right, this guy’s going to walk and if this guy walks, he knows who I am. He knows where I live. He will come and kill me.”
“...The problem with sexual violence and sexual assault is who you had been moments before you were raped is gone.”
“You can’t trust anymore. You feel as if you’re just broken in so many ways. I often talk about sexual assault in terms of a hurricane. You can imagine your house is standing, then all of a sudden this thing goes through and your home and everything that you had collected is scattered and broken and gone and it’s disappeared and there are pieces that you look for that somehow resemble your life before. You find a picture, you find a teacup, you find something that reminds you of your former life, but the majority of your former life is no longer available to you.”
“It was this moment for both of us where we were able to sit in this space together and kind of lean into each other’s stories and witness each other’s harms and each other’s grief and ask each other the questions that we had needed to know. It was that process that really began to heal both of us.”
“I mean, I knew what had happened to me and I knew what had happened to Ron, but no one had ever explained to me what had happened to my memory.”
“They wanted somebody to blame and that’s the culture we live in, somebody is to blame and someone’s going to have to pay for it and I was that face.”
“For whatever reason when we talk about wrongful conviction, no one seems to want to blame the actual perpetrator.”
“So for me, forgiveness looked like letting go and forgiveness for me, looked like taking my power back and finding my voice again.”
“Healing Justice really is a unique organization. Our goal, our singular goal is to heal, is to use restorative justice principles and help people heal from the harm that was created by something that was never their fault to begin with.”
Links
Jennifer and Ronald’s book: Picking Cotton
Facebook: Jennifer Thompson
Instagram: @jthompson1001
Twitter: @jthompson0429
Charity: Healing Justice
Shout out: Madison Merrill, podcast fan, who introduced us to Jasmine Heinz at the California Innocence Project who connected us with Jennifer. Thank you!