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“I woke up to him raping me. I was going in and out of consciousness and I couldn’t make it stop,” Christine recalled.
Overcome with guilt, Christine planned to tell no one what happened in a basement that December night. That is, until she found out she was pregnant.
“I had never seen my dad cry, until then. He was on the floor, balling his eyes out. Then he said, ‘let’s go to the police station,'” Christine said, saying she never considered abortion to be an option.
By then, it had been about six weeks since she had been raped and police told her it was too late to pursue charges against the young man.
“They basically said ‘we’ll do a police statement,'” she said. “We just let it lie. We did a police report, they had his information on file — the little I could provide.”
At 17, she became a mom. Young and in need of help to provide for her son, Christine applied for government assistance, unaware that doing so would start a chain reaction she couldn’t undo.
“The state in turn sued the father for child support so they could recoup their money. I freaked out. I said ‘I want to stop assistance. I’ll work eight jobs if I have to, I don’t want him involved,'” she said.
It wasn’t long before she was slapped with a lawsuit. Her rapist was suing to exercise his parental rights.
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