WHEN "Lani" (not her real name) saw Orrel K. Lui Jr. on TV newscasts this week, pleading no contest to several counts of burglary, kidnapping and sexual assault during a five-week crime spree last summer, she unwillingly flashed back to the afternoon of Aug. 11, 1996 -- the day he robbed and raped her. Rape victim relives
trauma of her assaultIt was about 2 o'clock. Lani heard knocking at the front entrance of her secluded Tantalus home. Standing there was a disheveled-looking stranger.
When Lani asked what he wanted, the man yanked open the latched screen door and started walking toward 45-year-old Lani. "He said, 'I won't hurt you. I won't hurt you,' and I said to myself, 'Oh, my God. He's going to hurt me,'" she said.
Lani unsuccessfully tried to talk him out of raping her -- saying that she had herpes, someone would be home any minute, that she worked at the Department of Health on an AIDS program. Finally, Lani asked him to at least wear a condom. He wouldn't.
After getting off of her, he ordered Lani to stay in the bathroom while he used his T-shirt to gather her purse, credit cards, jewelry, a camera, and even a bag of tortilla chips and two sodas. Before running out the door and up the long pathway to the street, he pulled out the telephone cords and told her to "stay right here."
As soon as Lani heard a car start up and drive away, she ran through a bamboo forest to her neighbor's house and asked to use the phone. "I was just burglarized," she told her neighbor, too ashamed to say that she had been sexually assaulted. Lani told the 911 operator the same thing.
A patrol officer arrived in 10 minutes to take her report. "I wasn't just burglarized," Lani solemnly told him. "I was raped, too." Within the hour, seven other cops including a female detective converged at the scene to dust for fingerprints and interview her.
An officer drove Lani to the Sex Abuse Treatment Center at Kapiolani Medical Center. She talked to an SATC intake worker and consented to a rape examination.
The doctor collected semen specimens, and gave her antibiotics, medication to prevent syphilis and gonorrhea, and something to induce her period in case of pregnancy. She was offered Valium, but declined.
Five hours after the attack, Lani insisted on returning to her house. She wanted to fetch her cat and get the phone numbers of credit card companies so she could put a stop on all her accounts.
The police and others she came in contact with marveled at her calm demeanor throughout the investigation and medical exam. But Lani was in shock, she admits now, and simply didn't want to fall apart. It was her way of regaining some semblance of control over her life.
THE next day, Lani went to work as usual at the state Department of Health. She told only one girlfriend in her office that she had been "assaulted" less than 24 hours earlier. Maybe things could get back to normal, she thought.
She was wrong. Over the next year, Lani would be traumatized again by various people and organizations that she believed were on her side. They included representatives of the police, prosecutor's office, Sex Abuse Treatment Center, credit-card companies and the stores that had honored her stolen credit cards. According to Lani, it was like being raped all over again.
On Monday: Revictimized by the system.