I am not the only woman who has been reliving the worst moments of her life these past few weeks.
And I am not the only woman to flay myself open and lay my emotional pain bare on the podiums of social media. Hoping that someone else will see and know they’re not alone. Hoping that the oxygen on the exposed wound will help it heal. Hoping it will make some difference, any difference at all.
But something slipped under the radar in the Kavanaugh hearings. Something that was brought up once or twice in a few news articles, but was largely ignored because it was only two words — and beneath the weight of alleged horrific actions, words seemed less consequential.
And these words have not left my head.
I’m not pretending that a few words have done the same damage to me that actions have done to other women. But these words keep coming back up for me, burning and nagging like bile in my throat. Because they remind me of one of the most painful things that has ever happened to me, something I’ve never actually confronted.
In my head, for weeks, I’ve been repeating:
Renate Alumni.
I was a college sophomore in a school 800 miles away from home, and I was struggling. My freshman year had been full of calls to suicide hotlines, difficulties making friends, a rejection by my first big college crush, dangerous crash diets, and an identity crisis that caused me to cut all my hair off.
But by sophomore year, I felt like I was finally on the cusp of fitting in. I would sometimes get invited to play drinking games on the floors of tiny dorm rooms, or go out with groups of girls to parties at frat houses, dancing for hours on squeaky hardwood floors that were slippery with sweat, drinking horrible beer from kegs in the basement.
And, just like in high school, I found it easy to make friends with boys. I felt comfortable dancing next to them, eating lunch with them, drinking with them, cracking jokes with them. I had been wrestling with weight issues and cripplingly low self-esteem since the age of 11, so I didn’t expect them to be romantically interested in me, which actually made it easier. I thought that if they weren’t attracted to me, they wouldn’t treat me like they treated other girls. They’d see me as a friend.
Renate Dolphin (then Renate Schroeder) was also friends with boys. She hung out around a group of boys from Georgetown Prep, the high school near her all-girls’ Catholic school. She went to dances and events with them. She probably joked around with them.
Renate Dolphin didn’t know that her name appeared 14 times in the 1983 Georgetown Prep yearbook. She didn’t know that 13 graduating seniors used her name on their personal pages. That DeLancey Davis called himself “chairman of the Bored” of the “Renate Club.” That Tom Kane called himself a member of “Renate’s Suicide Squad.” She didn’t know that Brett Kavanaugh simply referred to himself as a “Renate Alumnus.”
She did know about a poem they’d written about her, one she hated so much that she asked them to stop saying it. Michael Walsh put the poem on his personal yearbook page anyway:
“You need a date / and it’s getting late / so don’t hesitate / to call Renate.”
But part of being friends with boys at that age is letting jokes like that slide. Continuing to seem like you’re cool with it, even when they seem to cross a line, even when they sting a little. If you don’t let it slide, you risk losing everything. I’ve let a lot of things slide.
And so did she. She still loved and trusted those boys so much so that she publicly signed a letter attesting to the moral character of one of them 35 years later. In 2018, Renate Dolphin, alongside 64 other women, signed her name to a letter attesting to Brett Kavanaugh’s amazing personal character. The letter stated that even at the age of 17, he behaved “honorably and treated women with respect.”
Then she saw the yearbook pages.
February 21, 2008 is a night I remember surprisingly clearly — I was a freshman and I was hanging out with some girls from my dorm in our campus cafe, the Gizmo. I remember it so well because it was a really good night. We were all sitting on couches, laughing and talking, sharing parts of our lives and our pasts. It was a night that gave me hope that college would get better.
A group of boys approached our group. I knew most of them. They were some of the boys I had started to become friends with, started to be comfortable around. I had inside jokes with some of them. I’d had beers with a few of them. I had a huge crush on one of them.
They were all pledging one of the biggest frats on campus. They singled me out and asked if one of the pledges, a boy I knew by sight but had never met, could take a photo pretending to “murder” me. I thought it was a little weird, but refusing to play along would mean not seeming cool. And I was sure it was all in good fun. These guys were my friends. I wanted to help them out.
Unlike Renate Dolphin, my name never appeared in any yearbooks or poems. Instead, this is how I was referred to in the school newspaper exposé of a major fraternity’s hazing rituals the next year.
Thur., Feb. 21, 2008: an activity in which each pledge is given a nickname and asked to take a picture of themselves portraying it. One pledge received the nickname “Beowulf” because the fraternity had learned that he had drunken sex with an overweight woman at a party. To complete the picture portion of the activity, he chose a different overweight woman at random in the Gizmo and took a picture of himself “slaying” her.
Renate Dolphin didn’t find out about the yearbook references to her name until over 35 years later. She didn’t know until after she signed her name to a letter promising that one of them was a good, noble man. She didn’t know until their yearbook pages were in the paper. Her quote to the New York Times:
“I learned about these yearbook pages only a few days ago. I don’t know what ‘Renate Alumnus’ actually means. I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue. I pray their daughters are never treated this way. I will have no further comment.”
A year after the photo was taken in the Gizmo, I was sitting in a computer lab, about to finish my statistics homework late at night, procrastinating by browsing through the weekly school newspaper. That’s when I read the article.
I remember the way I stopped breathing. I remember the way the back of my eyes stung and prickled. I remember the anger and the shame. I remember all that hatred of myself and my body, that hatred I’d been working so hard to overcome, all rushing back. I remember reflexively grabbing the extra flesh on my stomach, trying to hold it in, like I could push it back in, like if I could make the fat go away, I could make the pain go away.
That betrayal and pain followed me from that computer lab. It followed me to classes, it followed me in the eyes of people on campus, it followed me to every party for the next two and a half years. It follows me today.
They lied when they talked about what “Renate Alumni” meant. They lied, and they lied again.
In his opening statement in his Senate hearing, Brett Kavanaugh said about the incident:
“One thing in particular we were sad about, one of our good — one of our good female friends who we would admire and went to dances with had her name used on on the yearbook page with the term alumnus. That term was clumsily used to show affection, to show she was one of us.”
They wanted to show her she was one of them. So they made her into a joke and didn’t tell her for 35 years. If Brett Kavanaugh wasn’t nominated to the Supreme Court, she would have never found out at all. That was the courtesy they showed “one of our good female friends.”
I wasn’t surprised they lied about Renate. They lied about me. The next paragraphs in the original college newspaper article read:
[The fraternity] officially apologized to the woman that gave the pledge called Beowulf his name once someone outside the fraternity confronted them about its offensive nature. [Redacted] said the pledge class involved, of which he is a member, apologized to the woman in the picture in the Gizmo after being confronted as well.
“The picture is on him, he’s the one that chose to take the picture,” said [Redacted]. [Redacted] said the woman in the picture was asked if it was all right to take her picture, but admitted that nobody told her what the picture meant before or after she agreed.
I didn’t know what else to do with the hot, nauseous feeling I carried with me for the next few days. So I wrote a letter. It was one of the only anonymous letters ever permitted in our school newspaper. I requested anonymity because I didn’t want the attention, didn’t want more eyes on me, didn’t want to be seen as the fat girl from the hazing scandal.
In my 500-word letter (because I was, after all, an English major), I talked about how I wasn’t apologized to. I talked about my disappointment in the fraternity and in the pledges. I tried to be dignified, in a way that they weren’t. I wrote:
I cannot express in words the hurt and humiliation I feel for both myself and the other woman who was dragged into this hazing episode. But the worst part, personally, is that I considered myself a friend to several of last year’s [redacted] pledge class, and while they looked on, knowing what the picture implied, not one had the courage to stop such a demeaning act.
I don’t regret the letter. I’m proud of it still. But I do regret one part: I referred to myself as a “healthy size 10” at one point in the letter. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I hadn’t felt the need to prove that I was healthy, or put a number on my size. But a part of me still needed to prove something to the world and to these boys. I still needed to prove that I was good. And now, looking back, I’m struck by this: that they never felt the need to prove that they were good, but I did.
There was never a reply to the letter. There was never an apology. I still saw the boy I took the photo with on campus regularly. My heart still sank with horror every time as I wondered whether he remembered me. I never went back to the frat, for fear that somewhere, on some wall or in some drawer, that picture was still there. I didn’t go out dancing anymore.
Renate didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for this. We were just women with male friends. We laughed with them. We studied with them. We drank bad light beers with them. When you find out that someone you trusted really sees you as a joke, it should make you see them as less of a person. But instead, you’re the one who feels like less.
I have no doubt that today, not a single one of them remembers what happened. I have not been able to look in a mirror without reliving the “Beowulf photo” for 10 years. And if I saw one of these men in front of the Senate, being confirmed to make choices about the bodies of women like me, bodies they saw as comedy, bodies they didn’t connect to a person who could hurt, I don’t know if I would have the strength to step forward.
I believe Dr. Ford. I believe Renate Dolphin. I believe that there is a pressure on girls to loosen their own boundaries to fit in with boys, and I believe that boys use these loosened boundaries to bully and belittle girls under the guise of friendship.
Renate Dolphin is more than a yearbook joke. I am more than a photo from a frat hazing joke. Being seen as less does not make us less. It makes us stronger.