Staying Afloat

For two months after the rape, Sweeney tried to carry on normally, focusing on her classes and starting therapy sessions at the NYU Wellness Center. She still saw Olsen on campus. Before his admission of guilt over Facebook, Olsen maintained that it had not been rape and that they should date. One day, feeling defeated, she agreed to date him.

“I thought about just trying to kill myself that night. Living to the next day, I eventually told Brandon that the only reason I agreed to dating was because I didn’t really care to live any longer, the idea that I had invented the thing that had been tormenting me for a month being too much to bear,” she wrote in the report.

Apart from the friends that were present at the house in New Jersey, she confided only in her family and her therapist about what had happened to her.

As the semester was drawing to a close in late November 2013, Sweeney reached a breaking point. She was in her room at Othmer residence hall. She had fought with Olsen, who had told her to stop bringing up the assault and telling others about it. He stormed off, only to return and insist that she sleep at his dorm. Feeling trapped, she agreed. She told him to go ahead to bed, that she would be right there. Then, she went into the bathroom and sliced her neck open.

“I slit my throat because I didn’t think I could get away from him and be alive,” she said.

Sweeney was hospitalized twice following the incident — once to stitch up her neck, and then again for university-mandated psychiatric evaluation.

After being released from the hospital, Sweeney attempted again to carry on normally.

Two months later, on Feb. 1, 2014, another encounter with Olsen led to her filing the report. She had allowed him to sleep on the couch in her dorm room after he was locked out of his own room, but awoke to find him in bed with her.

After filing the report, per protocol, university officials informed her she could file police charges with university help.

Though she initially declined, a few days later she told her friends that she planned to go to the police. They discouraged her, especially the friend at whose house the assault took place. Sweeney said she was appalled — her friends had turned on her. After that, she drank alcohol and swallowed pills. Olsen’s suitemate found her and forced her to throw up the pills.

“Afterward, I never heard from any of them again,” she said, referring to her friends.

The next morning, Sweeney visited the hospital. When she returned to her dorm, she was informed that she would not be allowed back in. She said she had been called a hazard to fellow students and was told to return to the hospital for an evaluation. She was then placed on medical leave for the remainder of the semester.

She independently filed charges with New York and New Jersey police in mid-February.

Neither of the police reports filed have resulted in a trial as of press time.