FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LET'S NOT LET THE VICTIMS BE TRAMPLED BY OUR LIBERALISM

FORT LAUDERDALE, MAY 2005:  When Karen and Sharon Sanders were abducted and brutally raped on a Louisiana May night in1977, they were only fourteen years old.  The twins and their twenty-one year old cousin were petrified that their attacker would come back to continue their torment.  He had promised to, if they told what happened, and their ravaged innocence gave them every reason to believe he would.  More than a week passed before Karen cracked and the secret was out.  Even after the perpetrator, Vincent Simmons was captured and identified by all three victims, even after Simmons’ conviction for the crime, the aftermath of the rape and trial left festering scars that disabled these young women from leading normal lives.  It is testimony to the inner strength of the Sanders twins and their close-knit family that they were able to overcome this crippling incident in their lives and even offer Vincent Simmons forgiveness when he faced his parole board twenty years later.

The Sanders twins forgave but they never forgot.  They carried their scars into adulthood, lugging fear and suspicion from what had been their idyllic childhood into adulthood, a weighty burden of innocence obliterated too soon, visciously and sadistically by a man with a past full of felonies.  A man who shot at a deputy after his arrest, a man who has never shown a sliver of remorse for the damage he inflicted on his victims, a man who, by all rights, deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Fast forward to 1997, when a film crew visited Angolo Prison in Louisiana to produce a documentary entitled The Farm about life in the controversial prison, and the Sanders’ rapist, Vincent Simmons, caught a piece of the spotlight. While the resulting sympathy did not gain Simmons his parole, it did initiate an outpouring of sympathy – not for his victims – but, ironically, for the rapist himself.   Suddenly the event that Karen and Sharon had tried to extinguish from their lives for many years became media wildfire.  The Farm was nominated for awards and received worldwide attention.  Suddenly, the perpetrator was the victim.  As Simmons whined that he did not get a fair trial because, as a black man accused of raping two pubescent white girls in the deep South during the seventies, the color of his skin ensured his conviction.  Immediately, the Sanders girls began receiving hate mail from all over the world.

Karen Sanders would have preferred to forget, to obliterate any memories of the rape the same way Simmons had obliterated her innocence so many years before.  Instead, Karen wrote her and Sharon’s story to share with the world.  Raped:  Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt is that story.    

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